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THE MYSTIC 



OTHER POEMS, 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY, 

AUTHOR OF "FESIUS." 



BOSTON: 
TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 

M DCCC LVI. 






AUTHOR'S EDITION 



In Exchange 

Univ. of North Carolina 

JAN 3 1 1934 



CAMBRIDGE : 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY METCALF AND COMPANY. 






CONTENTS 



PAGE 

The Mystic 5 

A Spiritual Legend 65 

A Fairy Tale ........ 139 



THE MYSTIC. 



THE MYSTIC 



Who holds not life more yearful than the hours 

Since first into this world he wept his way, 

Erreth much, may be. Called of God, man's soul 

In patriarchal periods, comet-like, 

Ranges perchance all spheres successive ; and in each, 

With nobler powers endowed and senses new, 

Set season bideth. So with him it seemed 

Of whom I speak, the initiate of the light, 

The adopted of the water and the sun. 

Time's sand- dry streamlet through its glassy straits 
Flowed ceaseless ; and he lived a threefold life 
Through all the ages ; yea, seven times his soul 
Commingling, leavened with its light the world. 
First in the feasts of life, and the sun's son, 
Through all God's homely universe he roamed 



8 THE MYSTIC. 

Lordly, and spake to earth the lore of stars, 
The mother-tongue of Heaven our Fatherland. 
Born to instate mankind in veriest truths, 
By nature symbolled in gem, bloom, and wing ; 
To give to all the hope of bliss reserved, 
And ultimate certainty of angelhood, 
He, like a river which through gullies, rocks, 
And deserts runs its purifying race 
To Ocean's thrice regenerative depths, 
Chose thorough all probations his own path, 
And voluntary trode the downward way ; 
For they whose eyen by spirit-fire are purged 
Move ever up the reascent to light, 
On a ccelestial gradient, paved with wings ; 
Disrobed him of all privilege, and alone 
Suffered the dignities yearned for by the mass 
But that he might ennoble servitude. 

Grounded in Nature's sacred cipher, he 

The myth-insculptured language of the light, 

In templed tome and lay columnar read, 

The masque of gods. But not all spirits can bear, 

Untutored, full and free access of truth. 

The sage, who ken the verities of soul, 

Whose be the preview clear of prophet-bard 



THE MYSTIC. 

To ope the inner spirit by outward keys, 
Who while unclothing still can screen the truth, 
That inexpressive wisdom — silence known — 
Unless in this wise, lip them not aloud. 

Initiate and perfect in mysteries, 

He graduated triumphant. Thrice he set 

His foot upon the mount of light divine 

And eyed the all beneath him. First, ere earth, 

Like the libation of a crowned bowl, 

O'erspilled the depths of the unknown abyss, 

By Nile with honey flowing, that through soil 

Promethean, swift as eagle pouncing, drops 

Oceanwards, sun-beloved and primal land 

Of magic marvels ; giant head of earth 

First looming from the flinty seed of fire 

And pre-asternal darkness — eldest ally 

Of lost Atlantis, lost ere Europe crept 

From Chaos' lap, — long time he wandered ; (him 

His mother, child of royal priest, conceived 

Dreaming of Gods in visions of the night, 

Amid consphasrate harmonies, and awaked 

Never until she clasped her dream-born ; ) bent 

To snatch from labyrinthine secrecies, 

Wherein the holy mystics taught their rites, 



10 THE MYSTIC. 

Regenerant Truth ; from hall to hall pursue, 

As though from sphere to sphere the winged soul, 

Through all disguise the aeternal unity ; 

Through all terrestrial ill coelestial good ; 

Through triple darkness light ; through matter's marble 

veil 
The divine spirit, all parent of the sun, 
Queen of heaven's azure world-hive, celled with stars. 

He at his birth the starry stamps received, 
For every limb held commune with its god, 
And planetary gifts plenipotent ; 
The moon dispensed him riches, and the sun 
Mind-wealth, that so before his dazed eyne 
The splendid spectrum of immortal fame 
Perpetual danced ; soul-compulsory power, 
The god of psychopompous function, round 
Circling the sun with fourfold force ; love's star 
The joys that come with beauteous shapes and eyes 
Dewy and blue ; courage the god-star red ; 
Supremacy and justice they who held 
Successive, if usurped sway, o'er the skies. 

Around him lay the great concerted whole ; 
The moaning winds and cadent waters, fire 



THE MYSTIC. 11 

Aspirant, sea bass-toned and reboant earth ; 
For only man's crude ear of discord dreams, 
Jarring the orbed harmonies of heaven. 
And for the cause that soon as born his lips 
Dropped music, like to the dew-bright beads of honey 
From fleshy flowerets pendent, nectarous, he 
The over-dominant movement of all life 
Knew, and elicited its vital moods. 

The soul of every animal, from the ox, 

Thunder begotten, to the solar wolf — 

As he re-rose from Hades, — god of death, 

Thenceforward to man hallowed — to destroy 

The spirit of all ill ; and scarab, type 

Of the great world-artificer ; from the lord 

Of golden flocks, lamb-headed, to the goat 

Sacred to sin in all rites, he, in turn, 

Bespake, and each to him the awful word 

Passed, that makes ope the thousand courts of life ; 

The universal and aeternal sign, 

Itself life, death and immortality, 

Which silenceth yet answereth all demands, 

And bindeth evil with an endless chain. 

Armed and impowered therewith, no foe he fears 

Who seeks salvation in the heights of heaven. 



12 THE MYSTIC. 

Asp-crowned, gold shod (thus treat the abhorred gold 
Of false esteem), his breast bedight with gems, — 
Home of all virtues and the embrace of Truth, — 
He prayed, he prophesied, divined, and judged. 

In granite graven, and on porphyry hall 

And ceiling, with imperishable touch, 

He wrought the rise of night, and chaos' growth, 

The gross alluvium of time's turbid stream, — 

And birth of Love, that venerable babe, 

The recreator he of deathless life ; 

Wrought in that spirit awe-bound, wherewith, of old, 

The workman chiselled some cherubic shape, 

Nor knew but that the God who doth create 

And animate the whole — from whom the whole, 

Like essenced, emanateth — might appear 

In manifestive brightness, and array 

His Being in the form the holy artist framed. 

Close dogged by evil he the dateless hills, 
Mountains of gems, of gold, of silver gained, 
Within whose wombs he wonned ; but chased in vain 
For the more vanquished he, more power was his. 
Him, naked ghosts of maddening beauty, lamped 
By green and glistering gryphons' lidless eyes, 



THE MYSTIC. 13 

Led to alchemic vaults, where sat some seer 
Great jewels minting, and from the refuse gold, 
That naught be wasted, rounding royal crowns. 
The costliest of all treasures, knowledge how 
Like treasures to produce, he gathered there, 
Nor cumbered him with perishable proofs. 
Though by this tempted, and that warned, he took 
The path of light, instinctive, and was saved. 
For having fought his way through flood and flame, 
Helped by good daemons, hindered by the bad, 
And closed the gates of thunder on the gods 
Where they in their marmoreal heaven abode, 
Dark as the hourless mansions of the dead, 
And tested all things ; in the coffined core 
Of the heaven- wedding pyramid, at last 
He fainted in perfection ; and discerned 
How sweet was truth, for death in truth was life. 

In that blest death the gods divided him, 
And the stars claimed the portions erst their own ; 
They so adored him. World-beloved was he. 
The sun his head ; the starry souls his eyes ; 
His locks redundant asked the watery powers ; 
The living spirit his temples ; his strong hand 
The lord of fate ; his bent knee worshipful 



14 THE MYSTIC. 

The goddess of divine life ; and his feet 
The guardian of the destinies of souls. 

Dear to the bearded serpent, spirit supreme, 

Whose omnipresent eye approves the world, — 

Eye of the world of life, and nature's soul, 

Who lapped him in his cold blue coils, and flew 

Where live the stars : there, 'mid nocturnal day 

Where Death's grim orb illumes the restless ghosts, 

And with his scourge on. their own hearts inscribes 

The tortures of the evils they have done, 

He, weighed 'gainst Truth, down-dipped the skyey scale. 

Thence, hawk-like, through the purgatorial air, 
And many-regioned aether, peaceful, pure, 
Soul-quickening, soared he to the crescent moon, 
And sailed the sky's abysmal sea of suns 
In ark crystalline, manned by beamy gods, 
To drag the deeps of space, and net the stars, 
Where, in their nebulous shoals, they shore the void, 
And, through old night's Typhonian blindness, shine. 
Then, solarized, he pressed onwards to the sun, 
Lord of the living, guardian of all good ; 
And, in the heavenly Hades, hall of God, — 
Whose eye begat the sun, whose mind the moon, 



THE MYSTIC. 15 

The goodness and the wisdom of their sire, — 

Had final welcome of the firmament. 

The true, triunal God, thrice-greatest, one, 

Man, man-god, God, who symbolled, led him through 

The sky-arched, God-built temple of the world. 

Time's arid rivulet through its glassy gorge 

Lapsed ceaseless ; and again by Gunga's wave, 

(0 life and bliss assuring fount of heaven, 

The life-flo wings divine of Deity, 

How mighty, how mysterious is thy name !) 

He, of a damsel, sacred to the god, 

With fellow-maidens sporting, whom a cloud 

Of sunset glory clasped, and circumfused 

With vital brilliance, dropping — next was born. 

Through the star-gates of the high luminous land 
Came down the immortal aspirant of life. 
With royal abnegation of all power 
Prior, all motion, many a million years 
He had suffered as a mountain, and to heaven, 
In fiery heart-floods, for a thousand moons 
Without pause, preconfessed his sins, and then 
iEternal silence laid her snow-cold hand 
Upon his lips, and they were iced for ever ; 



16 THE MYSTIC. 

(After in life, the mount wherein he had been 

Enstoned he recognized, and felt it throb 

Beneath his footsteps, heartlike 'neath a hand.) 

A thousand years, an oak, he crowned the hill, 

And navies traced to him their ancestry ; 

In the sea's arms a million suns he passed ; 

Among the insect race that winged the air 

Or crawl the dust, the like ; among the birds 

That skim the sky, a myriad ; thrice that term 

Through all four-footed tribes of nature, fierce 

Or bland ; from these, through various grades of men, 

Of divers nations the o'er-topping stems, 

To the high peers of perfect sanctity, 

Native wherein, at length, the hundredth time, 

By pure persistency in sacred rites, 

And stern assimilations of the soul 

To fleshless life, even as the holy live, 

Through seven bright spheres successive, he, his soul 

Lift upwards, like a mountain by the main, 

That laves his marble feet sea-deep, and high 

O'er shore, plain, verdure, cloud, snow, vapor, bares 

To the chill sky his reverent brow ; and he 

This our initial world where all things fixed 

Or free are passed ; the re-existent orb 

Skyey wherein, until time's destined doom, 



THE MYSTIC. 17 

All that have lived mindful of sacrifice 

And holy rites sleep calm ; and, as he passed, 

He to the dimly gleaming shadows taught 

A prayer would ring them entrance into bliss, 

Like to the magic horn, in faerie halls, 

Of blast resistless ; thrice blown, every gate 

Of every palace opens like a flower : 

The odorous home of lightness, coolness, warmth, 

Change pleasing and perpetual, where they bide, 

Imbowered in all delights conceivable, 

Who, perfected by God's love to themselves, 

And that pure love to all His love requires, 

Upsoar to heaven, immediate, as the soul 

Bursts from its bodily chrysalis; — the mid-world 

Between celestial and terrestrial spheres, 

"Where first the denizens of each commune, 

Without or veil or shadow, toil or mask ; 

There giants and divinities divide 

The far-expanded sphere, and now in peace, 

But oftener far in war ; the birth-world where 

The souls of the unhallowed, of all creeds 

And nations, dwell ; where lower lives, too, lost 

For sins of man, by general doom of fire, 

Or flood, or sacrifice, are all re-born ; — 

The mansion of the penitent blessed, where saints 



18 THE MYSTIC. 

Austere, and sons of the Supreme, self-ruled, 

Reside in infinite freedom, to which sphere 

A silver gate, a golden to the last, 

Gives access ; the abode sublime of truth ; 

By wisdom, duty, verity only gained, 

Gained never to be lost ; for there is God, 

Creator, and Preserver, and Destroyer ; 

Initial, and perfection of all Being ; 

The infinite fulness of all spirit ; sum 

And sun of all the souls of all the spheres, 

Wherein, through every life of man or brute, — 

In origin, not end, alike divine, — 

He darts his raylets vital and seterne, 

He, the untempled God, above man's thought. 

For lo ! time's end, when, on his snowy steed, 
The great Preserver, blazing like some star, 
That with dischevelled infinites of light 
Between the sun's breast and the icy arms 
Of space extremest oscillates, sudden draws, 
From out its sheathed night, his gleaming glaive, 
And robs the age of life ; then, all renewed, 
Peace, innocence, and purity shall bind 
In flowery chains, the bonds of liberty, 
The race divine of man, the fruit of God ; — 



THE MYSTIC. 19 

And the whole earth, though now half-burning sands 

Or frost-white wilds, bloom into Paradise. 

And after, even this shall cease ; the spirit, 

Inured to meditate alone on God, 

Pleasure no more can please, finds scant delight 

In fragrant fields, grows discontent with heaven ; 

Yea, in pure wantonness with terror, tears 

The masque material from Time's phantom face. 

All Being shall then be reabsorbed in God, 

All minor deities in Him shall merge, 

As water vases, broken in mid-sea, 

Unite therewith the element they contained, 

And add their calculable drops to its 

Immensurable abysses, whence were cast, 

As out of moulds, the mountains of the world ; 

For all that shows not God, illusion is. 

And as earth's thousand seas, streams, lakelets, pools, 
Their separate image of the star of noon 
Hold, though he be but one, so every soul 
Its semblance of the One Divine retains 
Which all illumines, sweetens all ; and his, 
Affied to God, in massive ease and power 
Languescent, well might wield the world at will 
Whose whispered mandates awed the thunder down. 



20 THE MYSTIC. 

He, lion-like within the desert, dwelled 

From men apart, and so, intact of soul, 

In heart ascetic, continent in thought, 

The intelligible luxuries of life 

Shunned ; to a boundless level planed his soul ; 

Fasted on fruits ; and out of writhen frond, 

Or flowery chalice, quaffed the fountain free. 

By virtue of which liberated state, 

Lofty and passionless as date-palm's bride, 

High on the upmost summits of his soul, 

Wrought of the elemental light of heaven, 

And pure and plastic flame that soul could show, 

Whose nature, like the perfume of a flower 

Enriched with aromatic sun-dust, charms 

All, and with all ingratiates itself, 

Sat dazzling purity ; for loftiest things, 

Snow-like, are purest. As in mountain morns 

Expectant air the sun-birth, so his soul 

Her God into its supra-natural depths 

Accepted brightly and sublimely. Vowed 

To mystic visions of supernal things ; 

Daily endowed with spheres and astral thrones, 

His, by pre-emptive right, throughout all time ; 

Immerged in his own essence, clarified 



THE MYSTIC. 

From all those rude propensities which rule 

Man's heart, a tyrant mob, and, venal, sell 

All virtues, aye the crown of life to what 

Passion soe'er praepotent, worst deludes 

Or deftliest flatters, he, death-calm, beheld, 

As though through glass of some far-sighting tube, 

The restful future ; and, consummed in bliss, 

In vital and sethereal thought abstract, 

The depths of Deity and heights of heaven. 

Attached to things divine alone, as seal 
To chart affixed, he all truth taught and sought, 
Sweetly retired. As Eden's olive groves, 
That, in the luminous mysteries of the sun 
Perfectly ripened, were withdrawn to heaven 
So pure, and so intact, like diamond gas 
Exhaling 'neath the keen, fire-hearted lens, 
Lighter than light, imponderable power, 
His spirit soared, unwavering, up the skies. 
He to the deities, as his nearer blood, 
Willed all his grand domains, in trust, to keep 
Holy and free ; and still, to bar all strife, 
His poor and ignorant kin, the kings of earth, 
He piteously remembered ere he passed 
Through deathland, to the ultimate realm of light, 



21 



22 THE MYSTIC. 

And shared his orts among them ; they, his gates 
Quitting, scarce grumbled their ungrateful thanks, 
Because that, like the setting sun, he left 
A world of gold behind him, free to all. 

Time's arid streamlet through its glassy gorge 
Flowed pauseless ; and, by Sida's crystal flood, 
Which, as with sea seven-tided, bathes the base 
Of the high mount of vision, he was born 
Again, to teach, to all the nations, life. 

Born of the tree blood-sapped, which, on the steep 
Of knowledge, thrice, by vital wind, impregned, 
Buds forth her life, the mother of the world, 
Upon the royal rock four-faced, he dwelled, 
The tripod mountain, with its jewelled feet 
Long while ; the orient side of silver pure ; 
Beryl, the brow which overawes the sun, 
When, abdicating Heaven, he calls the stars 
To attest his end imperial ; the dead north 
Of glowing gold, the south of ruby paled. 

Up shining streams and over odorous lakes, 
In golden boat or silver, pearly oared, 
Dimpling the wave, he sped ; or dashing high 



THE MYSTIC. 

The fragrant foam ; and now his limbs imbathed 

Amid immortal nymphs, serenely pure, 

Like living lilies floating on the tide, 

In love with their own shadows, as they lay 

Beneath the cooling moon. From sacred trees 

Ambrosial fruit and gem-wrought raiment, tinct 

With the sun's infinite aureole, he culled ; 

And walked resplendent with his meteor eyes 

Thrice round the dragon king, world-lifed, who saw 

The first, and will the last of gods surview ; 

So vast and vile a monster, heaven and earth 

With thunderous groans and lurid blushes hid 

Their starry heads, when God, in words of fire, 

Asked them his generation, — Hell-begot, 

Hell-born, they said, we know no more of him. 

Yet sought he not illumination thence, 

But due confession of divinity ; 

For, in the radiance of a frame divine, 

In natal and coelestial light he stood. 

Though pure in aspiration, pure as is 
The pearl-rose halo round a star, so, proof 
Of the divine within us and the strain 
Of the coslestial heavenward, yet he sinned, 
In virtue of his nature, and sought earth ; 



24 THE MYSTIC. 

For sin is nature ; and through all life's gates, 
Like to the perishing flowery arches reared 
Before some fane, he willed to pass, for he 
The ultimate sanctity and seternal joy 
Foreknew that they led up to ; and, perchance, 
By his own consciousness of final bliss, 
He might the hearts of millions fortify. 

Now the destruction and re-birth of things 

He saw, and preached, and warned mankind they came 

By water first ; the gentlest rain distils 

In the beginning like small dust, until, 

Enlarging, gradual, every drop descends 

Huge as a millstone, and all life is drowned ; 

Then rise seven suns, successive, and at once 

Inhabit Heaven, till the whole orb be drained 

Of ocean, sea, lake, river, moisture, damp, 

Parched to a powder ; last of all, a wind 

Light as a leaf's breath 'gins to blow, and blows 

Stronger and stronger, till the tempestuous blast 

Uproots the mountains, eddying them about 

Like feathers in a whirlpool ; all the rocks, 

Disintegrate, lie loose and level dust, 

And the vast sphere is scattered o'er the skies, 

Like sand o'er an arena. Water again 



THE MYSTIC. Z 

Installs the regeneration of the world, 

Condensing some few atoms which the wind 

Rounds into rain-drops ; and, cohering thus, 

Drives languidly together, mass by mass ; 

The lighter particles rise, and air become ; 

The grosser fall, and cause the element earth ; 

This, fire solidifies, till, whole at length, 

The fused orb rehabilitated rolls 

As theretofore upon its coelar path. 

Thus, thrice made pure, by water, fire, and wind, 

In essence, earth spreads wide her lap, and heaven 

(In flowery showers, cropped by the hand of gods, 

Fruits, riches, and the robes of truth) descends ; 

"While censer-clouds condensed of sun-fired fragrancies 

Perfect the sweet lustration of all life. 

In saintly destitution, sacred need, 

He, light of time, his life-day harmless passed, 

Sparing all life by charity ; and, since 

All soul-sin seems a missing of the mark 

Resultant from imperfect force or aim, 

Exhorting all to look and work for good, 

In the supreme beneficence of God. 

For evil is temporal only, nor can be 

In the divine oeternal. From the void, 



26 THE MYSTIC. 

Along with bright creation, as its shade, 
It rose, and back to vasty void returns. 

Time's arid runnel through its glassy gorge 
Glode ceaseless ; and, anon, where the huge stream, 
Son of the sea, bursts through the skyey gates, 
Born of an angel maid and heaven descended, 
Who, bathing in its midst, the white-orbed flower, 
Of root eternal born, eternal bud, 
Upon its waters floating, tasted and ate ; 
Till, her within, its golden-dusted stem 
Branched crosswise into life, and fructified 
To soul ; the flower-begotten son of heaven, 
From birth immediate, perfected his steps, 
Assuming all divinity ; and hailed 
Himself the incorporate order of the skies. 

Nursed by the starry sea and those twin lakes 
Named eyes of heaven, and fed on the bright gems 
Dropped from dracontian lips, whose virtue gave 
Sole sustenance to his being, and whereby 
The living lines, on fiery wivern's back, 
The secret counsel of the universe 
Once read, translated all things, he achieved 
At one enlightening pang and blessed his woe. 



THE MYSTIC. 27 

Reason supreme him made innately wise, 
The stars prophetic and the holy moon, 
Interpreter to time of things a^terne, 
Ruler of rites and sacred festivals. 

And the invisible heavens the giant world 
Through him instructed ; him, star of earth ! 
Thou saddest, wisest, eldest of all lights ! 
The formless origin of things, and how, 
Proceeding from itself, the infinite 
Finite becomes ; returning thitherward, 
The finite infinite, whereby the parts, 
O'erleaping the interstitial net of death, 
Regain that continuity of soul 
Which ones them with the boundless and divine. 

Throned upon Hon hides and dragon skins, — 
Cloud-breathing dragons homed in heights of air, 
Amid the golden land his mellower years, 
Studious of immortality, he passed ; — 
Now by the moon-enclosing mountain, now 
Scaling the cloud-throne where the immortal fowl 
Of mighty fortune wafts from his jewelled nest 
The winds of all the world, — he gave the youth 
Ubiquitous dominion 'tween his wings ; 



28 THE MYSTIC. 

And bore him swift to the cities of the skies, 

Gleaming aloft, tranquil, in starry bliss ; — 

Now where the sacred soul-tree scents the breeze, 

'Mid marble cities, by the shore of pearl ; 

Or where the fountain, sprung from lightning flash, 

The fire-born water, flows, in whose bright depths 

He consecrates himself; around its source 

The true immortals dwell, of man unseen. 

Where, on the hill of dreams, the flower of sleep 

Flings forth its silky leaflets, he the juice 

Drank of millennial herb, a thousand years 

All blight resisting, which to age brings back 

Electric youth, the glory, this, of earth, 

And king of flowers. From him the holy learned 

Religion, justice, temperance, wisdom, faith, 

Outer and inner knowledge, endogenous truth, 

The five-fold world and elemental lore ; 

All mysteries hidden and imperfect, all 

Public and perfect secrets of the world, 

Of Heaven, earth, lightning, mountains, fire, and clouds, 

Water and wind, and when the end draws nigh. 

To spirit transcendent of inferior spheres 

Nature is always ominous ; notes of birds 

Doomful, and animal movements ; sun-shot gleams, 



THE MYSTIC 29 

And noon-day apparitions, shades, and pools 
Wherein the eve-star tricks her tresses bright ; 
And upward arts of fire ; presaging all 
Immortal destinations that so man, 
In likeness of divine perfection made, 
Happy on earth but happier far on high, 
Might reinstall the primal state of heaven. 

Alms gave he, as an alchemist, whose gold 

Flows inexhaustless, or whose pearly draught 

The potable perpetuity of life 

Vouched to its proud possessor ; till at last 

As man, the errant babe, intent on death, 

In orbital aphelion with his sire, 

Back to the irresistible bosom of love 

Wheels his precipitous foot, and with a smile, 

Foreseeing his apotheosis there, 

Bounds to embrace the beauty infinite ; 

So he, divinely rooted in the world, 

And lifting into life his facial flower, 

Back to the pre-eternals called of God, 

Passed, disappearing in the essential heavens. 

Time's sand-dry runnel through its glassy strait 
Flowed checkless; and the immortal seeker now, 



30 THE MYSTIC. 

The son of seven bright parents, orbs divine 

In precreative fire conjunctive ranged, 

Upon the hallowed ground where Phrat still pours 

His Paradeisal wavelets, cave-born, stood, 

Gray-bearded from his birth ; and onward, urged 

By the divine affinities of truth, 

Which, in the lowest depth, sees but a step 

Back to the pure perfection of the heavens, 

He crept, in stifling darkness, through a cave 

High vaulted, yea a world cave, where, as in Heaven, 

The truth first glimmered on him like a star ; 

Showing where waited him a white winged steed, 

That, fed on fiery adders, slaked his throat 

From burning wells. Him mounting, on he sped 

Through lions, wolves, and dragons, men of might, 

Open or secret enemies, sands of fire 

And storms of hail, the world's contempt or hate, 

The spells of wine and gold, luxurious love, 

Seductive beldames and adulterous ghouls, 

Vices that flesh devour, defile the dead, 

The sun-fowl, spirit of life-consuming time, 

The daemons that in mental darkness dwell, 

The brazen fort of royal tyranny, 

With sin-black hills engirthed (circumferent six, 

Central the seventh) all-mastering, though half-spent ; 



THE MYSTIC. 31 

Through threatening files of flamy ghosts and fiends 

Created from primaeval darknesses ; 

The horrors of all visionary hells ; 

Huge spectral daemons, figurative of sins ; 

And clueless mazes to the mouldy abyss 

Where, couched on rottenness, and guarded sole 

By pitfalls brimmed with crawling, weltering worms, 

Lo ! the white monster which appalls the world ; 

Death, but not him. O'er moats of sanguine sliine, 

And towers where glared a green and ghastly light, 

And battlemented walls of human bones, 

He sprang triumphant on his shrieking foe ; 

Smote him, and from his heart three blood-drops black — 

Black as the night the Son-God passed in hell — 

Wrung ; thence ascending by a starry stair, 

Each step a bliss, a virtue, he emerged 

Soldier of God, and conqueror of all fear, 

Therewith to purge the eye of wisest man. 

Scaling on foot the mount of heavenly fire, 
Where throned on triple columns sate the sun, 
He, in the glory of the bridegroom, stood, 
And knelt to hear the luminaries divine, 
The first created witnesses of God, 
Who in His bosom holds the living world 



32 



THE MYSTIC. 



As shepherd in his arms star-spotted fawn. 

From the moon's hand her starry stole he took, 

And zonelet studded with thrice ten beamy rings, 

Shining with light genetic, either side 

Broidered with signs, though breathing, living not. 

Indued, bespake him then the Perfect Light 

In wisdom's signal silence, and unrolled 

Before his eyes the archives of the heavens, 

The original deeds of God's great government, 

Star-writ, the golden-winged tongue of gods, 

Time's charter, and the fire-bound book of love, 

And heaven's all trinal lights. There too he viewed, 

Participator of God's general light, 

The infinite circlet filled of Deity, 

The world-wheel through the which he had winged in 

soul 
Beyond the high and azure plain of truth, 
To alight upon the peak of happiness : — 
There converse held with all the eloquent orbs, 
Interpretative stars, and counselling gods, 
Who thoughts divine, thoughts earthly, interchange. 

Sword, sceptre, key were given him, robe of white, 
And ring of royalty, wherewith he found 
Due worship of the golden-bearded kings, 



THE MYSTIC. 33 

Who from the mystic satchel where the lots 

Are cast of destiny, to him brought forth 

The inedible fruit of immortality. 

They in his hands the volumed lightnings laid, 

And bound him by an oath which all things heard, 

In thunderous echo of the unuttered word. 

The balanced hemispheres he held, wherein 

The good and evil of all time are weighed,. 

With universal justice, whence is shown, 

By all-solicitous love and doom divine, 

Man is, of God, the mean, and God, man's end ; 

For to the true soul all are ends divined, 

From everlasting, to their ordinal stand. 

Out of the world-bright cup of divination, 

Filled from the stream of life, that 'neath the throne 

Of light rolls ever, where its rhythmic flow 

Breaks into song-fraught wavelets lipped with light, 

He quaffed, and, mirrored in its rim, beheld 

All forms of future things ; the magic rose, 

Of speechless virtue, proof 'gainst all vile charms, 

That blossomed on the bank, he culled and smelled, 

And, from its fragrance, knowledge of the passed 

Perfumed his being ; from the whole he knew, 

Truth of all times and wisdom of all worlds, 

3 



34 THE MYSTIC. 

That all the constellations of the skies 
Shall lapse into the lamb, within his arms 
The cross of light upreared, while in her hand 
The virgin tunes her star-strung, lilied lyre. 

Of the coelestial vine, ten thousand branched, 
Which stretcheth o'er the skyey roof of earth, 
Heaven's holy tree, whereon the luminous fruit 
Of soul unborn, in glittering clusters hung, 
One by one dropping into mortal moulds, 
A golden shower, he tasted ; and by stealth 
Plucked from the pomegranates of Paradise, 
Unknown to crowds, the secret fruit of life, 
Star-orbed, immortal, ripe with solar seed 
The single seed, deathful yet mastering death, 
And knew himself divinified ; for he, 
With lote and holy honeysuckle crowned, 
As well the bruised theangeline, winch gives 
Prophetic sense, as juice of aglaophant, 
That subjects to the eye the invisible world, 
And horn sweet herblet of immortal life, 
Sipped, till transmute he stood, star-headed ; felt 
His eyes irradiate with an inward light, 
And recognized his angels where they wheeled, 
Like mated falcons round their creanced young, 



THE MYSTIC. 35 

Saluting him in rapture, man of men, 
Sole son of life, the crown and heir of time. 

They with him ranged the lucent orb throughout 
In after times man's home to be, wherein 
Plain, perfect, shadowless, like a globe of glass, 
Men shall be known of separate nations only 
Because their lands of different jewels are ; 
The continents of diamond, isles of pearl ; 
There shall be but two mountains, this of gold, 
Of silver that ; the seas shall all be wine, 
The lakelets hydromel, the rivers milk ; 
And, like some mystic palace, every home, 
A star-walled city, seven-fold fortified. 

He at their hest (so Heaven's own book of spheres 

Insculpt in arrowy light, ordained) his soul 

In the moon's argent streams did imbaptize, 

And purified his spirit in the sun ; 

A handful there of astral fire then seized, 

And hid it in his bosom like a flower ; 

From whence all sacred light was kindled here. 

One with all truth, he held himself divine 

While e'er he breathed ; a flowering branch of light, 

That by intense devotion shed a bloom 



36 THE MYSTIC. 

Of luminous beauty round the blinded mass ; 
A part supreme of the all-whole supreme ; 
Perfection in perfection perfected ; 
Abstracted from the world and gained to God. 

Whirled in a winged chariot with the skies 
Down through the planetary gates of light 
And lunar valves descending, earth again 
He raught, and, mingling with its chequered race, 
On the far fields of fire his God adored. 

Time's arid streamlet through its glassy gorge 

Slid ceaseless ; and the sphere-experienced now, 

Like to the pine, that, from its own sweet fruit, 

Springs into crowned perfection, from that crown 

Again educing its delicious end, 

Fell, with a falling star, into the breast 

Of a mild nymph, who by the muse-loved bank 

Of sweet Ilissus slumbered. Sore amazed 

She watched the growing wonder of her side, 

Nor knew the mystery till ten times the moon, 

Working like marvellous birth in heaven, and still 

As oft recovering crescent purity, 

Ushered the throbbing secret into light, 

That he his starry ancestry might hail. 



THE MYSTIC. 37 

Witting right well what 't was to fall from Heaven, 
From the immovable star-plane to the prime 
Conceptacle of motion, moonwards, through 
All spheres in graded order, to the orb 
Where dwells, in secret cell, the hermit Life ; 
His lot he knew, and straightwise calmly went 
His heaven-inquiring way, how best he might 
Win back the death-lost birthright of the skies. 

Plunged in primaeval darkness he began, 
From the first breathings of the universe, 
His godlike quest. By all the elements 
He was advised and aided. The vast sea 
Absolved him of all soil of sin ; the earth 
Embraced him as a child in her dark breast, 
And of her life the active passion taught ; 
Fire lent him torches kindled at the shrine 
Of some volcano's mighty altar, reared 
By mightier nature to the almighty sire, 
That he might light the holy to their end. 

Air gave him access to the gods, and made 
Her boundless reaches, rich with ore of light, 
Common to man and all divinities ; 
The sethereal fields of fire impalpable, 



tup; KT81 

Where the pro-kosrnial farm* of thought abide, 
Divine, of Goo 1 projected, won his soul, 
With pure ingenerate beauty, to explore 

Mind'.-; genial I ; theirs true life ak 

But though all helped hirn, none could satisfy : 
The course and destiny of that he sought 
from hirn hid in I Jades. Many a rite 
ret. sacred, night and d; 
With numbers, with a winnowed few, alone, 
V at last, he pressed through, till to him 

The Bon and moon, the glorious twins of light, 
God's golden seal, God's silver seal, grew dim 
To the self-luminous truth in Hadean halls 
Which shining showed the soul, whose fate he urged, 
The bride-queen of the God that sought her love, 
And dowered her with Elysium's diadem. 

Rapt to the breast of fontal Deity 
Divine embraces there received he, both 
Adoring and adored, by gods then 
Worshipped and men, he moved felicito 
The radiant serpent nestling in his breast 
And twining round his waist, caducean. Tl. 
nerate, and divergent weal and bale, 



TIIE MYSTIC. 

Bound to the sovran sceptre still of power, 

In the necessitous knot of life and love 

Assigning, godlike to the universe, 

Consociate of divinity, he viewed, 

With starry and all sympathizing eye, 

The sublunary realms of deathly life ; 

Felt the assimilant influences of heaven 

Flash through his soul with lightning joy, and meet 

Reply in earth-born fulminations made ; 

Saw the precontinence of the whole by God 

Within Himself, and ebb of Being's sea. 

Blessed with all visions holy and divine, 

Communion holding only with the wise, 

Silent in light (the radiant lizard loves 

And lives in light, himself all constellate) 

With Truth he joyed (as when the moon, disguised 

Like naked nymph, her limbs of light revealed 

To him, enamored, on the Latmian hill, 

Whose touch was inspiration, whose embrace 

Deific, seemed absorption into heaven); 

Abstinent of all matter, every cause 

Of mental perturbation, base desire, 

Eradicate and razed, the lunar ark 

Of pure regeneration awed he viewed ; 



40 THE MYSTIC. 

Beheld the seternal husbandman of heaven, 
Who sowed with star-seed all the wilds of space, 
Scattering the worlds broadcast upon his way ; 
And to that tilth coelestial set his hand. 

But not descent alone knew he ; from where 

Earth's Atlantean horizon upheaves 

The inconceivable convex, to the sum 

And polar point of light he passed, and thence, 

As at earth's natal movement, downwards struck, 

Through starry strophes and conversive glide 

Of orbs that round the ever-festive sun, 

And unformed stars, to heaven's immortal gates ; 

And as all nature animate on earth 

Began with life amphibious, so fore- starred 

By the coelestial crab, with whom the world 

Its eastward march commenced, — (for truly earth 

Crept ere she flew upon the breathing winds, 

Rounding the void inane, — and gradual all 

Accomplish due perfection,) — he between 

The aselline starlets and the manger dim 

Won, studious of the universal life ; 

Isis' twin godlings, silence and the light, 

Showed him their common immortality ; 

The bull with horns star-nebbed ; the ram, disk-crowned 



THE MYSTIC. 41 

And fish Euphratean, taught their varied life, 

Their spheral natures and spiritual hopes ; 

For of all these the denizens aspire 

Towards the invisible and paternal heavens ; 

By his sethereal side he paused who pours 

(On templed tablet traced), from ample urn, 

The first effusion into chasmy space. 

That starry stream and matter prime of worlds, 

River of God, on silver wings he swam, 

By goat-fish, crocodile, or horned whale, 

The mountain-swallowing deluge embleming, 

And demigod, who voluntary died, 

Aiming star-headed arrow winged with light ; 

Who taught him there sidereal truth as once 

The Larisssean youth Parnassian lore ; 

By scorpion death-stinged, or Typhonian snake, 

He boldly hied ; and by the assessor stern, 

With rod and balance poised, saw weighed the worlds, 

And heard the utmost measurement of time ; 

Beside the maid fruit-bearing he espied 

Her new-born starlet, the god altar-throned, 

By all the moons encircled of the year ; 

And lion, hearted with a royal orb, 

Which nigh his shaggy shoulder bore the sun, 

Invincible, who, 'neath his yoke of light, 



42 THE MYSTIC. 

Compels the starry armies of the heavens ; 
He, thief divine, heaven's starry apples steals, 
And glories in the feat ; in slumber lulls 
Air's orbed eyes o'erwatchful of the earth; 
Unfolds the love of beauty to the gods ; 
Fills earth with nymphs and heroes, and their seed 
Semi-divine ; usurps the throne of heaven ; 
From west to east, foot-swiftest of all things, 
Courses the sky ; withdraws the moon from earth ; 
Yet mindful of the time when once with eye 
Extinct he groped the concave, till the flock, 
Ram-marshalled, 'scaped the darkness of the sun, 
And victims, death devote, renewed their life ; 
And once, by night o'ercome, his locks of light 
Shorn, — but Time's temple hath not fallen yet ; 
Nor yet the Herculean pillars, east and west, 
Embracing, hath he hurled to total wreck ; 
Nor yet the gates of glory gone for aye. 

There resting on that regal sphere of light 

And happiest altitude, he stood and knew 

The sethereal essence of creation ; saw 

The world of mind roll Godwards through all time, 

And the circuitous course of good in life, 

Till temporal and seternal coalesce ; 



THE MYSTIC. 43 

For stars are signs of constellated truths 

^Eternal in the intelligible heavens ; 

Saw that to every world, wherever placed, 

Shine other eagles, serpents, crosses, crowns ; 

That hydra sins of foul corruption bred 

Subdued by grace are glorified ; whose yet 

Unceasing sibilation sounds, through life, 

To arms, the saintly combat of the soul. 

Him, therefore, the celestial fiend, who breathes 

The breath of death and from his mortal mouth 

Empoisons air ; beneath whose fatal fangs 

Creation sickens and all evil reigns, 

He fought, to free from fear the affrighted world ; 

Until the all holy and regenerant star 

Rise that shall rise, and into light transmute 

The sacred body of the universe ; 

And Truth, triumphant virgin and divine, 

All virtues heavenly and humane fulfilled, 

All suffering, all o'ercoming, up and rule, 

Sweet saviour of celestials. She his brow 

There sealing with a seven-rayed star, in sign 

Of victory achieved, around his neck 

Olympian wrapped the mantling skies moon-clasped ; 

The solar bowl of blended blood and wine, 

That sparkles in the prototypic skies, 



44 THE MYSTIC. 

The chalice handed aye of Nemesis 

To lips oracular, dreadless he received, 

And life reviving quaffed ; whence, clear in sight, 

He saw the rise of spirit, in its prime 

And purity sublimely ignorant, long, 

Till after lapse and forfeiture of bliss, 

All earthly suffering, and descent of death, 

Dearer to him and lovelier for her fall, 

Celestial love the soul immortal wed. 

Thence tracing the unseen course, which earth shall 

tread, 
In a no fabulous future, when the will 
Of man, so oft transversive of the truth, 
With God's shall coincide, and all be light, — 
The bright abyss he soared, but left unnamed ; 
Whether in lapse of ages it shall trend 
Towards the Orphean light, — of old there held 
Type of concordant spheres, — or southern sign, 
That in the heavenly roodloft starwise beams, 
Stands untranslated in the book of God. 
The book of nature He himself hath writ 
God still delights to read, and star by star 
Unfolds the volume of the universe 
Fate-clasped ; in time and order by Him fixed. 



THE MYSTIC. 45 

Thus conversant with gods, immortal, he 

The pure perfection whence he fell regained, 

Gifts pleni-solar, and pra>astral powers, 

Prophetic, and mnemonic of all time, 

With added wisdom of all ill and good. 

The gates of death he passed and doubly lived, 

The gates of life, whereby the blest ascend ; 

Then drave his dragon chariot round the world, 

Lashing with lightnings till they sweated fire. 

Gaming with golden dice/ he of the Sun 

Won thrice his light ; of ocean, deep by deep, 

His boundless realms ; of earth, her countless lands ; 

But their own bade them take again, while he 

One moment merged in that leviathan womb, 

And through the starry tabernacles borne, 

By seven bright maids immortal, (gleeful they 

At the lost brightness refound,) from the depths 

Of heaven's sidereal river drew and drank 

The lymph divine of light, the dew of life. 

Throughout the vast passivity he passed 
All active, through the grand ellipse of life, 
And circular progress of the wind-winged world, 
Safe from all storms of fate and floods of ill, 
And dreadless of the gorgon mask of Death. 



46 THE MYSTIC. 

All nature gladdened in those rites ; the sea 
Avouched his safety ; fire would harm him none ; 
Danced moon and sun around him with their stars ; 
And the Great Father solemnly rejoiced. 

Hallowed of heaven and consecrate of man, 

He in his palm the eye-crowned sceptre swayed, 

And belted sate enthroned and diademed. 

Time's sand-dry streamlet through its glassy strait 

Rilled restless ; and the heaven-invested seer, 

Of rainbow born and dragon stony-winged, 

While lineally descended of the sun, 

And cradled in regenerative tomb, 

The orbit of his life renewed. Beside 

The stream that through the midst the beauteous isle 

Disparts, tree hid, tree hight, (where haply once 

The tyrant lion of some cavernous land 

To lesser brutes his deathful law dispensed, 

Or with the jungle monarch, ivory-tusked, 

Held thunderous parley by the tidal swamp,) 

Or where the wave, prophetic and divine 

From Bala pours ; or on the far-off coasts 

Of sacred isle, where lunar mysteries 

Are solemnized, as erst, and consummate ; 



THE MYSTIC. 47 

Or, 'mid rude dwellings, once the abode of gods 

Of hostile faiths, he lowly dwelled, and learned 

On his cold knee, before white-bearded Eld, 

From Truth's pale lips her everlasting lay, 

And deepest, pithiest lore. For thrice nine years, 

Through fits of silence, loneness, fasting, toil, 

He fought the foe of spirit and subdued. 

The thrice-thinned juices of the all-healing plant, 

With moon-dews mingled and eye-brightening charms 

The unseen to see, himself invisible ; 

Honey, and berries red of the eerie wood, 

Oakcorns and apples, roots and wheaten cates, 

His fare and bever formed for twice an age, 

With amber flowing mead at mooned feasts. 

He on the circular mount of safety dwelled, 

Taught by coelestial serpent of the sun ; 

And learned his solar syllables of fire, 

And the moon's mountain alphabet (first conned 

By them of old, who, in the ark-hive, warred 

Sole with a world of waters, warred and won) ; 

And from the rock, cave-crested, downwards led, 

Eye-bounden, by the hand of priestess maid, 

Who in prophetic solitude abode ; 

Through the returnless valley, and thick-branched 



48 THE MYSTIC. 

Forest, whose trees sore strived, with audible groans, 

Their steps to intercept, they thrid their way 

Shorewards, to where the hazy sea of death 

Broke in black billows, soundless though their wrath, 

Intangible its waters. Pacing thence 

Into a skiff of grisly marble, they, 

O'er those mysterious straits quick steering, made 

The isle of blessed ghosts, with plenar breath 

That bright witch-virgin, silent but inspired, 

The filmy sail o'erfilling, and called up 

With the spirit of her breath so fierce a storm, 

That with their madding moil the waves themselves 

Inflamed ; fire boiled ; and all the waters blaze. 

Conductress ! enchantress ! lead me back, 
He cried, among the nations. They, meanwhile 
Returning, she to him like power imparts, 
Which freely he receives. The o'erflooding stream 
Whose freshets grieved the villager, he froze 
With one blast of his breath ; then, from its bed, 
Like to a glistening snake, the evil tore, 
And hung it high, stream upwards, on the hill. 

Against a foamy torrent in a skiff 

Of glass, he fountwards steered, nor, rock-dashed, brake ; 



THE MYSTIC. 49 

Till in the stilly birth-pool, anchored safe 
Amid translucent shadows, he, beyond 
All watery bruit a stone-cast, rode serene. 

By living ladder, to the enchanted chair 
Gigantic, hewn of huge and holy rock, 
Lifted, he sate and all the stars outstared, 
Gazing them down, dog, centaur, eagle, bull ; 
And the unmeasured monsters of Heaven's main 
Came foaming to his feet and licked his hand. 
They his heart lighted up ; and he from them 
Taught wisdom to the serpent ; and to spheres 
Their secret revolution, silent song, 
And sacred circuition of the sun. 

Impowered in turn by these with chariest charms, 

The sun, from dawn to night-noon, he outeyed 

From the peaked mountain which commands the world. 

And earth's penumbral pinions, by her side 

Quivering ; with him he leaped in joy of life 

Immortal proven, hand in hand, through air ; 

In sign whereof, on that most holy day, 

Heaven's globed flower, whose perfume is the light, 

Rose from the polar-north perpend, and not 

With slow initial motion from the west, 

4 



50 THE MYSTIC. 

As theretofore, in ages lost to time, 
Ere coal-palm leaved, or pristine pine, now tombed 
In earth's sepulchral centrals, had put forth 
The mystic life-cone, fern her feathery stem. 

On many an altar at his beck the sun 
Shot down his shafts of light ; the heavens and he 
Spake miracles together, and exchanged 
Sojourn of spirits ; for the heavenly came 
Earthwards, and heavenwards went the earthlier. 

Between the fires of sun and moon he passed 
Benefic ; and throughout the hallowed land, 
As at the great rekindling, when the heavens 
Shall shine with souls in galaxies, as now 
With stars, beneath the priest creator's hand, — 
Dealt forth to all the sun-incepted light. 

Upon the pyrameidal mount of law 

He sat, and soothed the nations at his feet, 

Urging in wavy tribes their yearly right 

Of blessing, and prescriptive gift of fire, 

The dues of doom, the balance and the chain ; 

The starry chain which links all souls to God. 



THE MYSTIC. 51 

Born from between the trinal clifts, age-ripe, 
In love and wisdom he all power consummed ; 
Midst of the luminous circle where the one 
The twain o'ertowers, and from the twain the third 
Derives, the whole one trine ; and where the sun, 
Beside his sacred city, as the close 
Of the great year comes specularly round, 
Descends, and sings and dances through the night ; 
Harping to all around his own high deeds, 

The grain and fruit he ripens, and the breasts 

Of living things he animates anew, 

In countless generations, times untold ; 

The many-nationed orbs he fills with joy ; 

The many-citied lands he roofs with light ; 

The many-isle d seas he sows with life ; 

While o'er them all his golden robe he casts, 

Stands the arch mystic, celebrant of Heaven : 

And as the solar song in silence ends, 

All gazing on the firmamental eye, 

Responsive to the light, his lyre he lifts, 

And sings with sphaeral power creation past : — 

God was, alone in unity. He willed 
The infinite creation ; and it was. 
That the creation might exist, His Son, 



52 THE MYSTIC. 

And that it might return to Him, the Spirit 

Disclosed themselves within Him ; thus triune 

But as the all-made must of necessity 

Inferior be to its creator, thus 

Arose the infinite imperfect, time, 

The spirit-host angelic, heavenly race, 

Brute life and vegetive, electric light, 

Matter and fleshly form ; to human souls 

Nine generations from asternity. 

But God, who is Love, decreed it should return 

By pure regeneration unto God ; 

Wherefore was need that He from whom came life 

Should taste death, but in tasting swallow up ; 

That commune with all creatures might be made, 

On this hand, and on that, with Deity. 

Thus death and evil expiate ends divine ; 

The Spirit the imperfect hallowing, death 

The Son ; the soul regenerate hies to God ; 

And as in radial union with the point 

Infinite, both in greatness place and power, 

Lives with the maker and the all-made in love. 

In anticlinal order next he hailed, 
And interpendent harmonies of song, 
Gentle and fine as the concurrent curve, 



THE MYSTIC. 53 

Perpetual, in the orbits of twin stars, 

The future fates and times divine to be ; 

The negative divinity of man ; 

The holy and unhappy blent in bliss 

At last ; the passed unburthened of her doom, 

Like conscience of her self-secretive truth, 

Condemning conduct but assuring life ; 

And when, in that vast volume penned of God 

Whose text is earth, whose margin is the main, 

His everlasting service shall become 

One hymn triumphant, jubilant; from all 

Doubt or fear free, remorse or self-reproach ; 

Serenely issuing from the soul of man, 

As from the lee of the o'ershadowing moon, 

Suddenly perfect, glides a star occult. 

Ceased he ; and all apart as the altar stone 
Of some Titanic temple, reared in eld, 
The golden and gigantic age of earth, 
By sacred groves, sun-founts and seats of gods 
Enringed, and radial avenues of rocks 
All navelling in the sanctuary divine, 
There at the universal mother's shrine, 
Round whom nine hallowed maidens minister, 
He worships in the granite-winged fane. 



54 THE MYSTIC. 

From wisdom's pearl-lipped bowl the draught he drains 

Of pure oracular rede, which rendereth men 

As gods wise, and illumed with day -like light : 

Then with his white wand cleaves the skies, and gives 

To kings their laws, to states their faith, to both 

The empire he disdeigns. To all he makes 

Patent his end, (truth's honey-gilded draught 

Boding him this,) and on the central shrine, 

The great dark stone, symbol of darkness' self 

All-emanant, and the divine obscurity 

Of Deity, as on the heart of light, 

Fanned by the sacred winds, which fail not then 

Due service to the high departing soul, 

Tempests and clouds the playthings of his power, 

Serene in will, and willing not to be, 

Upright he sate, and eyed the sun, and died. 

Initiate, mystic, perfected, epopt, 
Illuminate, adept, transcendent, he 
Ivy-like, lived, and died, and again lived, 
Resuscitant. On high his nest he wove 
In the strange tree whereof man first was made, 
Whose roots reach down to hell, whose topmost bough 
"Waves its bright leaflets in the airs of heaven, 
And communed with the universal life, 



THE MYSTIC. 55 

Beloved of lightning for its kindred birth, 

That vivifies its veins ; until possessed 

Of all that could be known, the whole he knew ; 

Cropped where they grew the flowers of learning, 

massed 
In meadowy beds, and bright with fragrant dew. 

Carving with glyphic art immortal runes, 

That rule the reluctant spirits of the dead, 

On living wood, with primal matter oned, 

Which breedeth still betimes celestial fruit, 

He, arrow-like, launched forth — heaven is a bow 

The chord whereof is earth — and charmed his way 

Led by prismatic clue through spheres and skies, 

Fire, ice, and scalding venom-floods of hell, 

To prove all sacred truth within himself; 

To test all holy virtues ; and to know 

The sovereign Master of the universe, 

Who hallowing, blessed his hemispheral aim. 

To him too came from Preadamic kings 
The shield of power, graved with seven mystic seals, 
Transcript of stars that signalized release 
Jointly, to him, of their domain o'er earth ; 
Incaved wherein, the book of light he conned 



56 THE MYSTIC. 

And read inscribed the truths which hallow heaven, 

Yea, viewed all mysteries not ineffable 

And ne'er to be unsealed, denude themselves 

Into two truths, of God and man, they one ; 

The light enlightened and enlightening light. 

From scrolls Sethsean and the columned lore 

Of lands unknown, or which was wisely hid 

In pre-diluvian volumes, (lost, alas ! 

Neath those ebullient waters which engulfed 

The foulnesses and sins of a naught world ; 

Or if conserved, in purity conserved 

Only, within that temple subterrene, 

Gem-pillared and nine-porched, from dust-doomed eye 

Secreted, by one deathless reared, ere yet 

Translated to the bosom of his God,) 

The secret orders of the sphere he learned, 

Not yet to be revealed, nor till the end, 

The coming incandescence of the globe ; 

Then let the Heavens astounded, list to Fate. 

By divine science and coelestial art 

He for the cause of the dear nations toiled, 

And augusted man's heavenly hopes that so, 

Child of the vast and universal man, 

(Man archetypal, starry and terrene, 

Whose head is high above the angelic seven, 



THE MYSTIC. 57 

Whose heart the sun,) he might, by awful rites 
Hinted in sacro-sanctities of the wise, 
From knowledge of aeternal names acquest, 
Illumined intellect and pure desire, 
Adhesion with Divinity achieve. 

His eyes, from constant converse with the stars, 

Conceived an astral virtue, and his brow, 

Cooled with their fragrant breath, grew bright; his 

soul, 
One and compatient with the life of time, 
Rose kosmical with all God's great designs ; 
And so on earth their luminous life enjoyed, 
The unapparent and essential fates. 
For God, when first He form'd man, so insphered, 
And veiled with beauty all compulsive power 
(Necessity, when isolate becoming 
By limited mutations of the will, 
A self-determinate freedom and minute) 
In the individual soul, that none but they 
Who extasie divine enjoy, agnize 
The universal impulse, but so act 
As though they ordered all things of themselves, 
And heaven were but the registrar of earth. 
In nations, creeds, and ages, men can trace, 



58 THE MYSTIC. 

Star-writ in night's imperial book of fate, 
The world's vast destinies ; but void, alas ! 
Of introvertive vision, not their own. 

To God soul-bounden, as some sacred orb, 
Content in its own brightness to outshine, 
Or be outshined by others, he the whole 
Perceived to him pertain, and him to all ; 
And found, by nature's ominous sympathies, 
His private fates proceed, like-paced, with God's, 
And their fore-fixed purposes concur. 

In temple-like totality he held 
His heart, hypasthral, open to all heaven ; 
And to all earth her future and her passed, 
Magician-like, divulges from his charts. 

As when of old some king of men might trail 
Between two hosts his glittering spear, and mark 
War's red meridian, in that dusty score 
Graving the death of empires and the birth 
Of new thrones, till in flow of years arise 
One who erases from the face of earth 
That sanguine wrinklet, so the universe 
Contentiously divaricate, he shows 



THE MYSTIC. 59 

Made one in spirit with eternity ; 
For man divine shall reign ; shall cede to God 
All rights, all laws, both priestly and externe, 
Vulgar and regal. One conclusive claim 
All passed confirms, and hallows all to come. 

To every mind the meaning it hath meant, 

Though blindly blundering on through clouds of speech, 

And crowds of forms, in surface differing, 

He, sole interpreter, with holy rod 

Hermetic, explicates, and proves for peace ; 

That all divisive theories but denote 

A secondary standing of the soul, 

And partial knowledge only of the truth ; 

Whose faith is truest into all projects 

That blessed secret, unitive and divine, 

The totalizing wisdom of all creeds, 

The faith asternal and entire, which us 

Ones with the heavens ; and that in all worlds, though, 

By the imperfect mean it passeth through, 

(As told in mysteries tauro-serpentine,) 

Good begets evil, evil brings forth good 

In blest regeneration ; and that God, 

Who all creates, all saves, all sanctifies ; 

Man, in himself, both sacred and profane. 



60 THE MYSTIC. 

These are the laws of light, sweetly severe, 

Which show that what disorder seems, gives proof 

Of order loftier than the mind of man 

(Who holds, because his little eyeball 's round, 

The infinites must be all orbicular) 

Pews in its petty systems : and these laws 

He, sagest Theocrat, whose church is heaven, 

Whose state all earth, whose law the book of God, 

The sole converter of the universe, 

Kept in his heart with holy fire ; and thus, 

In changeful perfectness, the wheel of life 

Trolled underneath his feet, till he beheld 

Grim, o'er the funeral hatchment of the world, 

Death's empty helm yawn ; and his toil was done. 

Like Mekkah's milky stone, which wastes away 
Beneath the kiss of worshippers, so life 
Darkens and wanes beneath its crowd of cares ; 
While Time's last sands silt up the streams of soul, 
Less, gradually decreasing, less and less. 

As when in northern marches dies a man 
Well famed of men, for virtues, or for birth, 
Great grows the press of mourners round his grave, 
In ceremonious silence ; great the show 



THE MYSTIC. 61 

Of lawny weepers lifted to dim eyes, 

As slowly slideth the bier downwards ; all 

Bare-headed, wordless ; so with simplest pomp 

Of their mere presence, all earth's kindred creeds 

(And his was perfect, he believed in God, 

In God the Spirit, and God-man, the Son) 

Clung round his heart and sanctified his end. 

All gifts were therefore given him, seals and signs 

Of radiant force and triply perfect power. 

The spirit of earth to him his double key, 

Defensive from all ills, all goblins, gave ; 

Wisdom her adamantine seal, and Truth 

Her sapphire signet ; Love his ruby ring. 

Spirits and apparitions of pure grace 

Came shadowy round at his interior will ; 

And one in chief, of angel charm, would come, 

(As though within her breast a dawn divine, 

Insensibly were orbing into life,) 

Perfused with roseate radiance, like a star 

Veiled in creative fire-mist, who his eye 

With spiritual clear-sight filling, showed 

Truths past all search, all height, all depth, all bound, 

Of interspheral orders, and their rise, 

Action, and central end. She in her own 



62 THE MYSTIC. 

Bright virtue him embracing gave his soul 
In secret, sweet assumption into heaven; 
And both with filial and parental bliss 
Imbued, bade wander through the golden plains 
With diamond blooms bestarred ; but ere she left, 
Lest he celestial pleasures might profane, 
Commingling speech thereof with mundane things, 
By the thrice sacred kiss of secrecy, 
An adamantine oath, his lips she sealed. 

The mount of shadow earth each night uprears, 

The sun each morn planes down, he clomb, and held 

Parley with orb and angel as they passed 

Self-luminous on their quests ; his nebulous thoughts 

Grouping in firmamental unities. 

At his will-fraught and evocative word, 

The strange star brightened largelier, and poured forth 

Its voice of light, or speechlessly withdrew 

Into its azure chambers, which the wide 

Abyss, precipitous, of space, o'erhang. 

The spirit-world, thus lovably coerced, 
Did homage, in such service deeming them 
Triumphant ; and reciprocal with all, 
All loyally he ruled. Thereat rejoiced, 






THE MYSTIC. 63 

All wisdom in one whisper they conveyed, 

All language uttered in one mystic word 

Wrought of sun-heated fire-flame, first pronounced 

Among the angels proximate to the throne ; 

Where cloaked with threefold light the all Divine, 

The infinite point, the circumfused Supreme 

Deific dwells, whose thoughts are tinged with heaven, 

His own asternal and impropriate bliss, 

As clouds and mountains with the noonday light. 

For, even as darkness, self-impregned, brings forth 
Creative light, and silence, speech ; so beams, 
Known through all ages, hope and help of man, 
One God omnific, sole, original, 
Wise wonder-working wielder of the whole 
\ Infinite, inconceivable, immense, 
The midst without beginning, and the first 
From the beginning, and of all Being last. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 



There were who spiritual legends feigned, 
Half lofty, half profound, not nigh half true, 
Believed, or seemed ; whereof one instance hear, 
As erst by early Gnostic of the Nile 
Taught ; garnished and enlarged in later years. 

Ere all, in ancientry aeterne, was God 
(Holy and blessed alway be His name) 
In essence inconceivable. He in space 
As luminous fulness, pure perfection dwelled, 
And in an infinite unity. 

Coaeterne 
With God (for ever blest and worshipped be 
His name) and contrary to Him as good 
Was matter, mother of all evil, end 
And centre, caused by Deity nowise. 



68 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Light 
And darkness are the emblems of these powers, 
And ensigns. From their opposition comes 
Of good and evil like necessity ; 
While death and body, life and soul, compugn. 

From the All Being Father (Love his name, 
Mercy and Grace) the Spirit first was born, 
The spirit, thence the Reason, called the Word ; 
From reason, Providence ; from providence 
Came Power and Wisdom ; wisdom Righteousness 
Joyful brought forth, and power almighty, Peace. 

God's light through His trine essence self-reflected, 

As through an infinite prism, and like the sun, 

Of heaven's great bow the sevenfold hues producing 

These seven blessed spirits, attributes divine 

Which do His essence designate, evolved. 

He, in His own substantial deity, 

The same, to whom the septenary stars 

And days of time be consecrate, conceived, 

Issued and vivified, with Him to live ; 

iEonian beings of divinest strain. 

Of these the twain, hight Power and Wisdom, joined 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. bU 

In holy union, forthright generate 

Angels of highest rank and noblest force, 

In nature godlike, and in number such 

As saintly calculations dedicate 

To heavenly orders ; such, on Thracian mount, 

The maiden muses, sacred to the sun, 

Who, hand in hand, with ominous laurel crowned, 

Roses or stars, do hymn the universe. 

Pure and beneficent these ; inferior still 

To their progenitors, as they to those 

From whom they boast their birth. These first com- 



A heaven wherein companionably to dwell, 
And to delight each other. From them sprang, 
Native to thrones and glories unconceived, 
Angelic generations, rank on rank, 
And heaven on heaven, innumerably spread 
Down through the starry crystalline, in clouds ; 
Each order forming its own coelestial home ; 
Like numbered with the daily circlets of the year. 

These all the dominance supreme confessed 
Of the ^Eternal, in one mystic word 
Abraxas, since, on many a jasper gem, 



70 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Of talismanic and regenerant force, 
Insculptured, — hailing Him their total lord 
And Spirit Father. 

They, meanwhile, who dwelled 
Of the angelic nations, in the last 
And lowest round of all the heavens which stretched 
Its confines to the dark material mass, 
Malignant, uncreate, inert, self-lived, 
Which lay, a weltering chaos, deep below, 
Felt, as their glittering pinions oft they poised 
In level flight above its stormy face, 
And gulfs of unpierced wonders, vast desire, 
Heightened by warm debate among themselves, 
Then- neighboring state to soothe and purify ; 
And form, leave sought of God, first, and obtained, 
Since theirs the limits of the angel realm, 
A race of beings fitted therein to abide, 
Branch forth and govern other lower lives, 
To be for their behoof created. 

Fired 
With this imperial and divine intent, 
Through the three hundred three score spheres and 

five 
Of super-imminent hierarchies, flew up 
A band eclect of the aethereal powers, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 71 

Who carried rapture on their snowy wings, 
Unto the footstool of the omnipotent One. 

There, breathing low their wishes and desires, 
Made holy by the end, to enlarge God's reign 
And purify and dignify the mass 
Of matter, dark and void, with creatures apt 
For such estate, though lower far than they, 
God hearkened, granted leave to do their will, 
And proffered more even then. 

Plenipotent 
The suppliant assemblage returned ; their brows, 
As through circumvolant myriads on they passed, 
Bright with the sense of God's imputed power, 
Flashing delight. Benevolent they went, 
Creative they returned ; and to their hosts 
Of fellow-immortals all their triumphs tell. 

Grand was the joy throughout those radiant tribes, 
Lift to the zenith of celestial bliss, 
And instant impulse urging to begin 
The work orbiiic ; glorying in their plans 
Of future suzerainty and wide-spread sway 
Among new worlds of creatures yet to be. 



72 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

God taking thought, Himself, of sun and star, 
With whom to think, indeed, is to create, 
Those heavenly isles of light, of light profound, 
Light within light, the bright abodes of bliss ; — 
Chaos, the rude conglomerate, co-seterne 
With all Divinity, they first commenced 
To soften, free and sever by degrees, 
From multiform confusion, into fixed 
And elemental sections. 

Thence appeared 
The all genetic waters and clear depths 
Of air's unseen but palpable flood, wherein 
The water-mountains melt, in themselves drowned ; 
The youthful breeze ; and fierce gigantic storms, 
Allies of evil and confederate fiends, 
Which the sun's variable heat obey ; 
The virgin fire, inviolably pure ; 
And earth's all mothering bosom. 

Soon, distinct, 
Ocean and continent, sea, desert, plain 
Mineral and vegetive, concrete, complete, 
By separate hand, each Power a separate type 
Framing, to grace his will, or prove his force, 
Of stone, earth, tree, plant, shrub, grass, herb, or flower, 
Mountain, or isle, or river, lake, or well. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 73 

The angels made the solid earth ; its rocks 

Chaotic and amorphous, petrified fire, 

Granitic, oolitic ; sand and lime ; 

Igneous and aquatic beds of stone 

Upheaving or collapsing, seemed, in turn, 

The awful sport of some Titanian arm, 

Whose elbow, jogged by earthquakes, wryed the pole. 

The angels wrought the mountains, bulk by bulk, 
And chain by chain, serrated or escarped, 
Or coal-red burning from Vulcanian forge ; 
Hekla and Mouna Roa and Auvergne ; 
Tuxtla ; and Tongarari, southwards isled ; 
By savages beset, who deem, when dead, 
Their chieftain's eyes translated into stars ; 
Andes and Himalaya's heavenly heights ; 
Dhawalaghiri's pinnacle supreme, 
And Chuquibamba's cone of roseate snow; 
The hill Altaic named the almighty god, 
By Tchudic tribelets of the age of mounds ; 
Higher than lark can soar, or falcon fly, 
Cloudlet, or visible vapor scud, it stands ; 
Oural, and Balkan ; Alp, and Alp pennine ; 
The magnet mountain which directeth earth, 
Brainlike, ensconced beneath her snowy crown ; 



74 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Lupata's mighty spine ; Lamalmon's pass, 
O'ertoppling ; Abba Yaret's glittering peak ; 
Ankobar's, Medra's ranges ; all that ring 
The desert heart of slave-land, or thence stretch 
To the Cape of Storms, and lion of the sea ; 
And Erebus antarctic, fenced with ice. 
Marmoreal mountains, by their radiant hand 
Polished to white perfection, so to prove 
A beauty beyond use, the angels piled ; 
Kailasa, and the aethereal mount Meru, 
Dazzling the sun with gems ; Larnassus green ; 
And Athos, and Montserrat, holy heights, 
Mountains of monks, and hills of eremites ; 
And that Kropakhian, wonder-mountain named, 
Without, within ; whose central fount obeys, 
With an obsequious volume, the moon's wane 
Or increment ; and that funereal spur 
Of dark black marble that beglooms the air; 
Or, walling earth, the spirit-haunted Kaf, 
With many a mythic marvel crowned of eld ; 
That crystal mount (cloud crested, once it stood 
In western Tucuman) with bright reply 
Answering the solar messages of light 
As equal equal ; deep below its base, 
O'erarched a navigable river runs, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Rumbling its rock-pent breakers, white with wrath ; 

Or where, 'mid central isthmus (on each hand 

Pacific and Atlantic tides) is built 

Coy Iximaya and the precipitous gates 

Of that recondite capital, haply doomed 

To vanish into cloudland ; the idol rock 

Mackinaw vaunts, where red braves, worshipping, 

Prophetic murmurs of oracular shell, 

Shrined in its ark, hearkened ; and holy Tor 

In many a land to deity devote ; 

Divine Alborz, the holy mountain named, 

Where, sunlike, the Simorgh, all-wise, abode, 

Moon-peaked ; or mount oracular of the gods, 

Olympus blest ; and either sacred Ide ; 

In that bright isle where Rama reigned, the peak 

Whereon the print of Bouddha's foot (esteemed 

The last of gods) or Adam's, first of men, 

Hallows the land to pilgrims of all creeds ; 

And thee, dread Sakhrat, pendent once in air, 

Now fixed ; once soft as heart of man to grasp 

Prophetic ; 'neath whose saturated roots 

All fountains rise ; plomb underneath the new 

City of God ; upon whose crest shall stand 

The stern archangel when with judgment trump 

He hails the generations of our race, 



75 



76 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Those living, those whom hollow Hades holds : 
All these and countless more the angels wrought, 
While dear they were to God and kind to earth. 

The angels trenched the rivers ; and unsealed 

The secret wealth of many a fountainous hill ; 

Where Oby, now, or sunny Kour, for wine, 

And virgin gold, and hapless virgin slaves, 

Renowned, flows ; holy Boug ; or warlike Don ; 

Or Po, by Goths imprayed with murderous rites ; 

Or that, beneath whose bed the wasteful Hun, 

God's scourge, lies coffined ; (so shall onetime sleep 

All evil, 'neath the covering flood of love ;) 

Where Darro, by the mountain of the sun, 

Sweeps with steep wave ; or Guadiana dives ; 

Or where the rivers flow, of life, of death ; 

Volga, or legendary Rhine ; or Rhone, 

Vine-banked ; or Thames, with the world's wealth and 

that 
City of cities, crowned with golden spires, 
The towers of God, enriched ; Isis, or Cam, 
For love of wisdom famed, and Clutha, sung 
By warrior harps of old days ; there, where now 
Ohio broadens, or gross Missouri dims 
The deepening sire of floods, aye tiding on 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 77 

His current deluge to the gulfy breast 

Of central seas ; or, Niagara hurls, 

Precipitant, his thunderous waters down 

Their crescent steep ; or silver river, south, 

Through grass-flowered Pampas pours recoiling wave, 

Prescient of blood fraternal ere the end ; 

His face with intertwining snakes alive, 

Thick as the savage tribes that tread around ; 

From Boreal ice-floes where all waters cease, 

To Magellanic straits and land of fire ; 

Where pagan Saghalien, iced to his bed 

Three seasons yearly, steals ; or sacred Sinde ; 

Or Chandra-bagha, holy to the moon ; 

Or Brahmapootra, fling o'er bordering meads 

Their annual floodlets fruitful ; or Hoang-ho 

Through fragrant tea-fields winds; or where, with 

palms 
Embanked, barbarian Quorra ; there men trade 
In ivory, gold, and blood ; nor far remote, 
Who the divine child, babe aeterne, adore, 
Unconscious deity ; or Zenhagal, 
With gum-woods girt ; or Gambia ; or, rock-brinked, 
That by Mataman, townless land, rolls ; that 
Kaffrarian, endless called ; and (only found 
Late-while) who through the island continent glides, 



78 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

His current dwindling seawards, dark Moray ; 

While Araluen's golden-footed nymph, 

From rocky urn coerulean, teems her tide ; 

Hydaspes ; branchy Gyndes, fabulous floods ; 

Orontes, on whose slopes the wine of gold 

In ripening globules glows, whereof, at eve, 

Roused from his stony solitude of walls 

By turbaned traveller with his camel train, 

Not seldom sips the hospitable monk, 

His cup commending to the bearded lip 

Of smiling stranger, garrulous in signs ; 

And that sabbatic river, which to flow 

The seventh day ceaseth piously ; these all 

And more, innumerable, brooklet, beck, 

Rill, runnel, rivulet, the angels made, 

Administrative of terrestrial wealth, 

And will coelestial, while at one with God ; 

And rivers subterrene booming through caves 

Down to earth's focal fires, still inextinct, 

And flaming floods, whence, dashed, they reascend, 

Volcanic vapors, and explode the hills ; 

And linn, and force, and torrent ; Corra's foam ; 

Thy falls, unfailing Rhaiadwr ; and thine, 

Shoshonee, wreathed with shifting rainbow mists ; 

And those of Dekkan Ghauts, earth's loftiest leap. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 79 

The angels reared the islands ; that of yore 

Neptunian, where the sea-god righteous ruled, 

And his ten sons, now sunken in mid-sea ; 

And that Panchaian, where Triphylian Jove 

Judged from his mountain chair the sacred soil ; 

The starry islet wandering with the wind, 

Pure of all death, the birthplace of twin gods ; 

For sun and moon proesolar light precedes ; 

Bacchic and Cytherean isles ; those spread 

Sporadic or cycladic ; Cyprian soil ; 

And Rhodian, sovereign of the sacred sea ; 

That isle, the sun's, whose sacred slaughtered kine 

(When the bull led the constellated round 

Ere by the star of storms, gigantic, smote) 

Caused to the wise world-wanderer floods of woe ; 

The winged island, flying round the world, 

Walled high with gold-bright crystal, giant-kinged ; 

And fairy Avalon, still where Arthur rules, 

Sole as the sun in heaven his shining shrine ; 

Stern Hertha's, stained with the sacred blood of man ; 

Elysian islands, all-felicitous, holy, 

Where dwell the blessed Immortals, years divine, 

The elemental sequences of suns, 

And ages everlasting of the heavens ; 

And Bolotoo, the paradise of gods, 



80 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Far off in western space, a land of shades ; 
Where, to chance wanderer, for the future bound, 
And searching for some secret lost to earth, 
Tree, temple, tower, and grove-clad hills present 
But permeable forms ; through all he stalks, 
As through a builded vision ; wall and bark, 
And cliff, close round the path he passeth through 
Unharmed, as water round a diving gull ; 
Islands of honey, pearls, and gems, and fire ; 
The isle auriferous, whose minutest rill 
Outbids Pactolus ; those which clustering pour 
Spices, perfumes, oils, incense, and sweet gums, 
For human delectation or divine ; 
Feejee and Papua, men-devouring isles ; 
Black Hayti, the imperial negro's throne ; 
Niphon, where, temple- shrined, the golden bull 
Butts, first, with fiery horn, the egg mundane ; 
And that Ogygian, westward, where the sun 
Utters his final smile, and gleams his last 
Through groves of worship dedicate to Fate ; 
And those white isles whose pre-antiquity 
Transcends all date, the primal seats of gods, 
Truth, science, song, and all commanding mind : 
All these, and countless more, the angels made, 
While dear they were to God and kind to earth. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 81 

The angels scooped the lesser seas and lakes ; 
Baltic, and Midland, soundless ; and that womb 
Of nations, on whose life-devouring shore, 
Far jutting into the black and boisterous deep, 
Sebastopolis, key of empire, stands ; 
The pool Miotic, worshipped as a god 
By Scythic hordes, and Amazonian dames, 
Militant, jealous of the dexter breast ; 
And Caspian, deep below whose silvery wave 
God's Eden hideth, and the hallowed glebe ; 
Aral, Van, Baikal, holy lake, most vast 
Of mountain meres ; and Tahtar Kokonor ; 
Ladoga shoal, deep Leman ; isleted 
Lomond, subterraneous of access ; 
And many an iceless and unfathomed pool 
On mountain crest, or cowering at the foot ; 
Ontario, Winnebago, and the Slave ; 
Yutah's ; hard by where the polygamous sect 
(Misled by one self-unctioned, not anoint, 
Nor golden oil of genius had, nor truth, 
Who from the brook the lines of lacquered lead, 
Sham angel-forged, dug out ; who, after, fell 
Shotted with three times Coesar's trickling wounds, — 
Ill-doer he, ill done by) bide their hour, 
Dreadless ; the great Saline ; and Aztek, bowered 
6 



82 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

With floating pleasaunces, where sailed the swans 
Of sway symbolic ; Amucu, golden-banked ; 
Or Titicaca, from whose sacred shores, 
Long ages lapsed, the scions of the sun, 
Manco Capac and Mama Oello, stepped, 
Ancestral, to the sceptre of Berou ; 
Nyassi ; Ngami ; Mrima ; Zana, and that 
Lake of the gods, whence Nile, or white or blue ; 
And wide Nigritian Tschad, still inexplored : 
All these, and countless more, the angels made, 
While kind they were to earth, and dear to God. 

Desert and steppe they smoothed ; the waterless sea 

(But haply once where tide tempestuous rolled) 

Of Aphric Zahara, where the sand-wave heaves 

'Neath the simoom, parched, poisoning man and beast ; 

Kerman's sands salt-white, swept by flamy wind, 

Plague-breath'd, which, rousing up the desert dust, 

Blinds man's bright eye, and mummifies the frame ; 

There oft, in arid dell, the cool Suhrab, 

Calm mockery of sweet waters, overhung 

With green and succulent shrubs — you seem to hear 

The ripple of the waves — delusive lurks ; 

Chamo and Kobi, and the central wastes 

Of Austral isle, where range the tameless tribes 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 83 

Who hurl the bomerang, and, hunger spent, 
Do mess on their own blood, disseized of sense ; 
And those by Baku, where, through wimbled cane, 
The holy flame of universal fire 
Jets from earth's heart, upwards, to join the sun ; 
Saronian downs, and many a misty moor, 
Where aches the eye with objectless survey, 
And long dun moss, they spread prospective ; now 
With cromlech crowned, gray cairn, or fairy knoll ; 
Or lithic dance of giants 'neath the moon ; 
Hurlers or wrestlers who have justly earned 
Their stony transformation ; or some crew, 
Godless, that to the air of fiendly flute 
Footed, contemptuous of sabbatic chimes ; 
Now, days of rest millennial, hi their ears, 
And voluntary thunders, drone in vain ; 
And wold and wilderness, where nightly flit 
The grosser sprites that haunt these nether skies ; 
Unmarked, in day's broad glare, the moon's moist eye 
Reveals, to those who see, the filmy form ; 
Drowned lands and verdurous meadows submarine 
Where water turtles pasture, wandering free. 

Plains planned the Angels then, and champaigns vast, 
Savannahs, Pampas, prairies ; deeming earth 



84 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

One garden fit for gods ; and seeded them 

With grass and herb of every wholesome growth ; 

Shamrock and trefoil, symbolizing Him, 

In lowliest form, who them, their makers, made ; 

And pulse, and sesamum, and flax, and vetch ; 

With pearly rice, white wheat, and oats (of old 

Gold-washed for the imperial Roman's steed) ; 

Majestic maize, and metamorphic rye ; 

Millet and lentil, and a thousand grains, 

As many and as immixed as Psyche slipped 

Through her sad fingers, thrall and lost to Love. 

With homeliest roots of thyme and mint and balm 
The breezes they perfumed and purified ; 
And that heart-soothing herb, not less renowned 
Than lote, nepenthes, moly, or tolu, 
Held to untaint from sin the savage soul ; 
Weed of the west, that on Virginian plains, 
Or fields of fair Habana, moon-beloved, 
Lifteth its long lush leaflets ; youth and maid 
(Scion perchance of some Soudanian chief 
By hordes of woman-warriors, slain or slaved), 
Tending with nicest tact, till it become, 
Beneath the toned and educative hand, 
A roll of natural incense ; weed, that wild, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 85 

Climbs prophet Lebanon ; and, fragrant, fumed 
Through ambered jasmine, wiles the sultry hours, 
By plashing fountain's creamy marbled marge : 
(To him who sang man's fall, the eve of life 
This lightened ; and his restiff heart assuaged, 
The pilgrim bard, whose days these closely heel 
Of ours, who in the aftermath of time 
Live ; for fame's harvest long ago was got ;) 
Vervain and magic haschisch, which endows 
Thought with ubiety, and waking mind 
Clothes with the dread delight of dreams ; and kifF, 
Soul gifting with expansive extasie ; 
Madder and plants stellate, and watchet weed, 
By rudest fathers used of the mountain isles, 
Three-peaked, the golden, beautiful, and white, 
Conclusive of the wisdom of the west ; 
Orris and henna, for perfume or dye ; 
Mandrake and onion (hallowed wisely once, 
In nome Bubastean, sacred to the moon), 
"Whose coats concentric figured forth the spheres ; 
As though considerate nature, who, betimes, 
Man's facial features casually reveals 
In stony fracture or tree-trunk, reframed 
Li miniature, that man might ne'er forget, 
The holy image of the sphere-filled air, 



86 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

And earth, embraced by heaven, the core of space. 

They with fair fruit-trees earth an orchard made ; 

With rosy apple, purple fig, sweet pear, 

Date, honey-pulped, green glowing olive ; peach, 

Orange, and citron, with their gilded rind ; 

Sun-juiced muscat, and all the hallowed vines ; 

Guava and nectarine, mango, plantain, plum ; 

And that translucent pome, whose cloudy core, 

Seed-studded, glows detected, as it hangs 

On its slim branchlet, vibrant in the breeze ; 

The tree transformed of some unhappy god 

(Tale immemorial told in Tonga's isle), 

Whose fruit is vital bread, man's noblest food ; 

And that, lactifluous, from whose flower-tipped stem, 

High towering, the Caraccan Indian drains, 

At day-dawn, creamy draughts, to all his kin 

Dispensing, patriarchal, bowl on bowl ; 

The vast Baobab, like-aged with ocean's tides, 

Within whose cavernous and sepulchral trunk 

Meet village senates, lawing peace and war 

To dusky tribes, or, in its templed bole, 

The idol gods adoring of the land, 

Arboreal fane ; fair thorn, as yet unkinged, 

Unsanctified by woes of brow divine, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 87 

(We gild the thorns we put upon Him now, 
But, ah ! they pierce,) whose berries, blood-like red, 
Still speak of holiest, still of heavenly ends : 
While dear they were to God and to earth kind, 
All these, and countless more, the angels made ; 
More than infallible engine, for an age, 
Accomptant pauselessly, or clerk, on slate 
Or abacus ten-stringed, could sum. 

With woods 
And treeful tracts the provident angels clad 
What else were lifeless deserts ; where now stretch 
Forest and upland frith, and the wide weald 
Hercynian, where the demon shadow stalks ; 
And the Anderidan boscage, by divine 
Andate, all-victorious goddess, held ; 
And glades, where, rambling, in long after years, 
The outlawed archer led his banded bows ; 
Siberian forestage of spiry pine ; 
Oaks, which oracular in Dodona spake ; 
And equatorial groves that mat the shores 
Of Maracaybo, to Maragnon's streams, 
And falls of Tequendama ; (these were rent 
Ere yet the moon rode aery ;) the hoar woods 
Of growth eternal, continental reach, 
That all enclose, from gold-rocked Labrador, 



88 a SPIED UAL LEOEHD. 

To florid Lands tli.'ii seas Columbian lave; 
Prom ocean' gilded sand , by Kalamatb, 
'I o Ivery Zazatica and Secklonj 
Banyan, and temple cedar; gopher, planned 
Ail. v.j < of God to float man o'er \\><-. flood ; 
Laden with life, hope of the irorld to be; 
Willi trea lures raster than that bark, whose freight, 
(Spoil , of ill'- ack of Borne tyrannic queen, 
Of bonded nation* ravi hed the gilded /oof 
Of Jove's high capitol, the seven-starred lamp 
And golden table of God's temple, won 
By Vandal, king self-crowned of earth and sea 
And their affiliate i le ,) storm-sunk, bui served 
Willi ivory thrones and bui i marmoreal, gem , 
And jewelled caskel , armlei , torque , and rings 
A/i'i carquanets impearled, and coffered coin 
Of conquered tates, to startle or adorn 
Sicilian sea-nymphs in their billowy play; 
Cypress, the Leafy mourning nature wear , 
Dear to the dead and to the field of God, 
Where Lurks, in spade-turned furrow, seed death 
Divine seed, to be barve ted in heaven; 
'I'll*: poplar native to il^ land of bade ; 
Myrtle and ebony; dragon-blooded tree, 
al with the star \ sun-hallowed palm; 



I 

1 

J 
I 



90 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Fruit holy, fruit immortal, fruit divine, 
In sacred ripeness dropped ; or that, mayhap, 
Whence, chipped by giant woodman, man, brute, bird, 
Fell, flew, or, merged in water, swam as fish ; 
So fable Arctic folk, tribes sparse and spare, 
Whose crooked crones, in glittering huts of ice, 
(When the vivific sun, world conqueror he, 
Closing in peace his serpentine career, 
Quenches in snow his thunder,) to their youth, 
Sharpening the bone-tipped javelin for the morse, 
Quaint legends gabble of their primal eld. 

With arborescent canes and ferns they decked 

Marish and mead : and sands and lulls, else bare, 

With shrubs gum-pithed, gum oozing ; such were myrrh, 

Camphire, and cassia, spikenard, balsam, clove ; 

(Angels and all good spirits love perfumes ;) 

With many an odorous plant, both hill and vale ; 

Angelica, and honeyed melilot ; 

Day's-eye and king-cup ; fairy foxglove, fern ; 

And violet, crown of the sad Lesbian muse ; 

Crocus, pale purple or golden ; hyacinth, 

Skirting with azure haze the foot of woods ; 

Asphodel and narcissus, Hadean blooms ; 

And gore-dyed poppy, dedicate to death ; 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 91 

Moonwort ; sweet meadow queen ; and silver-weed ; 

Tulipa, dahlia, sunflower, aster, rose, 

Damask and white, of holiest silence sign, 

Of love divine, love perfect, love asterne ; 

The fragrant tuberose scintillating light ; 

Dianthus, flower of God ; and, loved of woods, 

The wind-flower, blooming faithful to one day, 

As Damon to his friend ; the iris, eye 

Of heaven ; eyebright ; and winter's flowers of gold ; 

The lotus, emblem of the sacred birth 

Of all from water, pure as spirit seed, 

Snow-blanched, or blue ; dew of the sea ; and those, 

The mistress, and the glory of the night ; 

The flame-flower, glowing like to carbuncle ; 

Kamschatka's scarlet lily, foodful root ; 

Nile born papyr, and serpent-creeping flower ; 

Sumatra's floral miracle, the font 

And baptistry of flowers ; the tea-rose pale, 

In central flowery realm of brightness born ; 

Magnolia ; and tall Yucca's bell-crowned mast ; 

Bogota's regal lily, whose broad and raftered leaves 

In some calm creek expatiate, wood enzoned ; 

And that night-blooming marvel which, when all 

Its flowery kindred, dew-drowned, sleep, spreads forth 

Its radiant cup., and like a midnight sun 



92 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Munies the green gloom, and perfumes the dark : 
The watery knot-glass, with the blood divine 
Sprinkled, that grew beneath Christ's hallowed rood ; 
Innumerous, the bright blooms whose fragrant speech 
Befitting corneliest love, the orient brides 
Wreathe into poesies, the angels wrought, 
While dear to God (ere eyes divine yet shed 
Immortal tears, as the amber droplets wept 
By daughters of the sun) and kind to earth. 

The angels then with founts the park mundane 

(From Athabascan cape, mornwards, to where 

Miako's gilded god, colossal, sits ; 

From Anadp*sk to Patagonian point) 

Graced ; cool and tepid ; these perennial, those 

But intermittent ; founts that torches fire ; 

Founts, that, presageful of the tempest, howl ; 

That ebb and flow contrarious to the main ; 

Or synchronous ; deep springs of bubbling brine 

Inland ; sweet waters 'neath the sea ; and that 

Far scalding, still self-petrifactive fount, 

Whose separate wavelets hardening, stone by stone, 

Yield mansions to the builders on its banks ; 

Founts scorching, founts petrific, founts of flame. 

Ice-cold to touch ; founts honey sweet ; the rill 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 93 

Which, sanguine, staineth gules the bordering flowers ; 

Fountains of ageless youth and maidenhood ; 

Fountains of love and of disdain ; and that 

Which Kai Khosrou, forewarned in sleep, beheld, 

(Oracular vision,) and, far journeying, found 

At last, but, therein bathing, disappeared ; 

The burning springs that o'er the Caspian's face 

Fear-shrunk, afar their fiery furrows drive ; 

The serpent source that hisses as it flows, 

Whose venemous wave all life instinctive shuns, 

One breed alone, connatural, thence exempt ; 

All these and countless more the heavenly tribes, 

Whose names are noted in coelestial tongues, 

Bade forth by the divining wand of will ; 

All wells on earth, save thine, divine Zemzem, 

Through starry strata strained, and musky loam 

Of paradise ; (there moon-browed maids of light, 

Immortal, dwell, and from the lakes of bliss 

Their star-cups fill ;) — thou afterwards wast born. 

Unfathomable caves and moss-green grots, 
For mysteries or retreat, the angels made ; 
For vision and prevision ; travelled trance 
Of spirit, through coelestial circles borne 
Prophetic ; those of Patmos, Paros' isles ; 



94 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Abdera ; or the Arab's desert cell ; 
The cave Iberian, where Tubal abode, 
Which great Alcides, after, amplified ; 
For magic rites and secrets darkly famed, 
Phantoms, and necromantic wonders ; wealth 
Untold, unhallowed ; death to all who sought ; 
The vaults Tartarian where the Titans groaned ; 
And those where still the rebel angels hang, 
Heel skywards, in hell's antechambers, chained ; 
Nyont's JEolian arch whence gush the winds 
Incessant, sighs chaotic ; and those caves, 
High pitched, in Erin's isle, or Anglian peak, 
With floors prismatic, purple crystalled walls, 
O'er-roofed with sparkling spires and pendent stars. 

Metal and mineral then the angels wrought. 
Gold, silver, copper, iron, and all ores ; 
Marbles ; and gems, of virtues potent signs ; 
The crystal, prevalent over gods, and hid 
Close in the hand, assuring heavenly help ; 
The achate, wealth abductive, and the mind 
Of the immortals gladdening, maiden's love 
Winning, man's friendship ; jasper, to the gods 
Delightsome, and potential bliss to earn ; 
The topaz, aidant in all holy rites, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 95 

Prayer favoring ; opal, dear to deities, 

Prophetic and heroic ; magnet chaste, 

Of all-persuasive effluence, speechless power ; 

The crimsoned coral, emblem of the soul, 

Reared in life's stormy deeps, the deeps of death, 

From mischief fending and hate's fatal glance ; 

Sunstone, which every phantom foul dispels ; 

Oracular starstone, warning weal or ill ; 

And bloodstone, symbolling earth, the gates of God's 

iEternal temple, with the life divine 

Sprinkled, prognostic dread ; the diamond, sweet 

And grateful to the gracious spirit throng ; 

The starry sapphire of celestial blue ; 

Ruby and emerald, jacynth, amethyst ; 

The amber, emblem of divinity, 

Winch with electric influence soul allures; 

The pearl conceived of dew and lightning, type 

Of that pure maid-birth yet to bless the world : 

Yea, cups of pearl, one pure and solid pearl, 

Greater than that in Haleb's slab ingrained, 

With natural nimbus (so pre-figuring 

The glory round earth's kingliest blood) enringed, 

Divinest relic in time's temple niched ; 

And that smaragdine mirror (their chief toy 

Which all the angels wrought, each gifting it 



96 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

With some unique perfection) after owned 

By Israel's wisest, who the tongues of bird, 

Brute, angel, men, knew ; the king looked therein, 

And eyed the passed, of any wished-for age, 

Apparent as in life ; event, or fact ; 

And when solicitous of the future, he, 

Steering by somewhat steadier than the stars, 

Had breathed thereon, with the evanishing reek 

From off its disk, he all the coming conned 

Limned in that talismanic tablet clear. 

Gems larger, lovelier these than all now known ; 

Richer than those twin rubies, called Caneques, 

By kings of Auphir, kings of heaven and earth 

Self-titled, oft in angry blood-bath dyed ; 

Or those that on the seven great gods illume 

The hall of gold in royal Arakhain ; 

Whose heads with diamonds, breasts with rubies flame, 

With sapphires, emeralds, pearls, their limbs and feet, 

And regal robes, rigid with woven gold ; 

Brighter than those the eastern soldan's throne 

Pavonian star ; victorious Britain's now ; 

Than those bright armlets, adamantine pair, 

The sea of light, and mountain, (now from sea 

Far severed,) seals and signs sublime of power 

O'er west and east ; more tempting to the touch 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 97 

Than all encrusting false Fenella's fruit, 

With deadly art contrived ; or those by Rhine, 

Shrined round the heads embalmed of sainted kings ; 

Finer, in fine, than all that now adorn 

Earth's circular board, (the table once of gods, 

And whirled by angels through the void inane,) 

Set deep, or surface strewn, they scattered wide, 

From Hungria, to Golcond and isles Molucques, 

And nightwards, to Brasil ; from central Koosh, 

Kumara, and the emerald mount, by Nile, 

To Ceylon and Altai ; soft, pure gold 

And silver, from Potosi to Yeutaw, 

The angels sowed the beds of rivers with, 

And serpentine and granite deep ingrained ; 

For boon they were to earth, and blessed of God. 

Then, last of all, the animal world they framed, 
Each Hfe-hifusmg angel, tribe on tribe, 
Higher and lower so with mediates linked 
And interlapped, that all on all might pend 
In mutual sustentation. 

First they filled 
The seas with fishy natures, which assumed 
Later, Vishnoo, and mixed Oannes claimed 
And glorified in memoiy of the first 



98 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Great form of life, anticipative, perchance, 

Unconscious, of that newer birth so typed, 

By signs Phoenician of divinest names ; 

Shark ; dolphin, lover of the lyre, for more 

Than one sublime adventure starred ; vast whale, 

The ocean beast, whose jaws, like hell's gates, once 

Yawned to ingulph the recreant prophet, cast 

By crew fore-fated in the ravening deep ; 

Ketus, and ork, and kraken ; remora, apt — 

Blow wind, flow tide — a ship to check, full sail ; 

Seahorse and seal, old ocean's flocks humane ; 

Sword-fish and saw-fish, sun-fish, ling and ray ; 

All that by coast or firth in endless shoals 

Or van, or rear, heave shorewards, or the depths 

Who, lonelier, haunt, and deathful ; all who through 

The weedy streets and gilded chambers glide, 

Of submerged cities, scornfully content, 

Nor wink their cold white eye ; thro' marble grove 

And coral copse they fan their wavy way ; 

Dorado, shimmering with all brilliant tints ; 

The winged swimmer of the deeps, and all 

That flout the whirlpool, down whose swirling maw, 

Voracious of all life, the shrieking ship 

Plungeth (as into a net baited with light, 

Bats) ; and dread Maelstrom, navel of the main ; 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 99 

Dace, barbel, pike, and every fluvial fin. 

Terraqueous embouchures with lizards lank, 
Gluttonous, hide-winged, with horn-lidded eyes 
And murderous hearts they filled, devouring death ; 
Monstrous and loathly reptiles, such as him 
Apollo slew, Kadmus, or .iEson's son, 
Or Jove-born demigod, or sainted knight, 
Or Perseus, on the shore by Joppa ; not now 
To man known, save as serpent of the sea, 
Eldritch, huge, (ocean-churner called in Ind, 
In Norland, Jormundgandr,) whose hoar mane 
And visage sadly human, reared mast-high, 
Appalls the dumb-struck mariner, as he nears 
At gloaming the blue headland ; those ashore 
Weening they glimpse some Pharos, by its eyes ; 
The terror of the weald, with spiky spine ; 
Cayman, and alligator, crocodile, 
Emblem of mystic silence and of God 
(For ever blessed and worshipped be His name); 
The fire-winged drake of Greek and Arab tales ; 
Boa and cobra, dipsas, and the snake 
By red men hallowed in the western wilds, 
Which nested nigh the well of waters bright, 
And annual multiplies its rattling rings ; 



100 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Asp, adder, basilisk ; and those the Moor 

Wreathes round his limbs, or in his bosom curls ; 

Vipers that charm the song-birds to their death 

By one long glistering glance, transfixed ; or those 

That fascinative seek the tender breasts 

Of wilful maids, and sing their souls to sleep ; 

Or such as him, less rare in years of yore, 

Who, by Bagradas, memorable worm, 

Rome's host braved singly, singly suffered siege, 

Waged war, till, by arblast and catapult, 

And burning darts, self-firing as they flew, 

Quelled, he at last capitulates with Death ; 

His shining slough to swell the conqueror's pomp. 

The air with birds they flocked; oracular dove, 

Thrice holy in tradition from the egg, 

Hid by Aturian turtle, and the flood, 

To Jordan's sacred streamlet ; raven false ; 

Night's song bird, lover of the moon ; the lark 

Blithe trilling in the blue, when spring's warm breeze 

And pearly flowers, and brooklets bubbling clear, 

And innocent sun, welcome the new-born lamb ; 

The vulture, all maternal, typing thus 

Earth, mountain crowned, the glory of the sea, 

And mother of us all ; thee, bright-eyed hawk ! 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 101 

Soul-emblem, sunwards soaring, as to God 
(Adored and honored ever be His name) ; 
The eye-plumed bird, King Taous, who, so starred, 
God's garden entered, bnt crawled out, a snake ; 
By winning lost ; wise-sighted owl ; and swan 
(Sire, by the light, of Heaven's twin orbs, mis-told) 
And sacred stork, thought human soul disguised ; 
Ibis, destroyer of sin's viperous brood ; 
And flamy heron ; halcyon heavenly blue ; 
Lone contur, nighest to the star of day 
Ranging, of winged life ; the painful pelican 
Self-sacrificial ; cormorant ; doomed dodo ; 
Giant-paced mooa ; ostrich, feathery steed ; 
Bright humming-bird of gem-like plumeletage, 
By western Indians living sunbeam named ; 
Macaw ; and gold-green parrot, human-tongued, 
For craft and wit predictive famed of yore ; 
Auk, albatross, and storm-birds of the deep ; 
And bittern moaning by the lonely mere ; 
Yea, every flying thing that wings the winds, 
The rivers of the air, with spirit-like 
Ubiquity in non-essential space, 
The heavenly framers shaped and beautified, 
For omen, augury, and song divine ; 
And paradisal fowl, bright bird of God, 



102 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Sole life unfiled of earth, or versed in aught 
Less pure than air. 

Air, too, with the insect race — 
Gold-bees that boom in lilied palaces 
Whose walls breathe odors ; sphinges of the eve ; 
Moths ; flutter-flies, all hued, like winged flowers, 
On violets pasturing, their congenerate food ; 
And flies, which once gave title to that God 
Alike mysterious in life's least of forms, 
And greatest ; locust ; and the lamping tribes, 
That light belated wanderer on his way — 
The angels plenished. 

With beasts four-footed, earth ; 
Mammoth and mastodon and deinother 
(Vast as leviathan or serimnar, 
In vain demolished, — on the morrow, whole) ; 
Dreadest of brutes, whose teeth as tombstones showed, 
Limbed like an oak ; but all swept off by Heaven, 
Creation at the flood revising ; huge 
Aurochs ; and megatherium ; elk enorme, 
Whose antlers spread like oarsman's oars well plied ; 
These, dying, deigned not fall, but bade their tombs 
Close o'er them, an' they would ; such sepulture 
(By glacial Lena, or Nerbuddah's banks, 
Or Mississippian swamps in earth remote) 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 103 

Had they, erect, and osseous monument ; 

Yak, bison, ounce, and elephant, sagest beast ; 

Camel, and llama, costliest sacrifice 

Of conquering Araucanian, who the world's 

Essential spirit worships, and on whose shores 

The mount of thunder, buoyant o'er the flood, 

Paused, in its world-wide wanderings ; beaver wise ; 

Bear honey-tongued, or, prowling round the pole, 

Lord of the land of snow and towers of ice, 

Where many a night of months the auroral arch 

Broods o'er lost graves ; and fox of fabled fame ; 

Chaste unicorn, whose generation 's known ; 

And stag, in saintliest legends sanctified ; 

Fleet-footed horse ; and noble-hearted hound, 

Faithful to man as to the wine-god, he 

Dog of the sun, in tropic travel tried, 

Now basking by the solar hearth ; or hers, 

Coelestial huntress, Dian's dogs divine 

Led in their leash of light ; or he who guards 

Orion's spacious steps ; or good Dherreem, 

Sung by Beyaussa, in the mighty war 

Of Kouroo and Pandoo ; four-footed friend 

Of righteous rajah ; he (that kingly kin 

All vanished into bliss, and deified), 

Left lone at last, shook off the shape canine, 



104 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

And shone heaven's primal virtue, peer of gods ; 
Goat, gladly blazoned on Jove's sun-bossed shield, 
Adored as Pan, or Mendes, but in name 
Ashima highliest honored ; zebra barred ; 
Tiger ; lithe leopard ; puma leonine ; 
And he whose tufted horns tree-tops o'erpeep ; 
Rhinoceros ; river-horse ; ghor ; agile ape ; 
Baboon, too manlike, hutted in the woods, 
Social, erect, club-armed, soul wanting sole ; 
Grim-tusked boar, of evil choicest type 
Whom ancient myths in the heavenly north instarred 
Feigning the summer sun to have o'erpowered, 
And urged to death solstitial ; earth, meanwhile, 
The beauty of all beauties, who emerged 
From water first in shelly car, wept showers 
And turbid streams till thy joy-hailed return, 
light of lights ; and trebly sphered reign. 
All these and myriads more the angels made, 
Lords of the desert's savage sands that drink 
Warm reeking blood, or browse or graze the mead ; 
While yet they loved the earth and wrought for God 
(Holy and honored alway be His name, 
Sole, seviternal, universal cause) ; 
But, ah ! too soon they changed ; and changed was 
all. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 105 

Thus made that host the world of sentient life, 
With fittest forms peopling the elements ; 
But eagle and ox and lion, these alone 
And one still nobler make, cherubic shapes, 
Were of Himself devised by heaven's supreme ; 
Monarchal in their nature o'er all else. 

With one surpassing instance all to sum 

Resolved the demiurgic host, and sued, 

Once more to that high end, God's promised aid. 

The angels therefore by His will made man ; 

His upper limbs these framed, his lower those, 

The chain columnal and the vital light, 

Informing nebulous the limbs, which still, 

Death after, lives in ghostliest symmetry, 

Or fills the accustomed place ; others, the flower 

And constellated organs of man's brain, 

Which do the interior tree of life o'ersphere ; 

Its nervous roots and branching arteries ; 

Both male and feminine, whose harmonious forms, 

Conceived accordant with divinest mould, 

He hallowed with His eye, and perfected 

With holy approbation ; to the life 

Instinct wherewith they lived and felt and moved, 

And all the twin-born passions of man's heart, — 



106 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

That variable orb, now great with love, 

And hope, now murk and mean with slavish fear, — 

Adding His gift, a reasonable soul, 

Whereby the good from ill they might secern, 

And spiritual from intellectual aims. 

These souls Himself created, for all time, 

And in the stars reserved, until their day ; 

To each allotting its appropriate orb, 

Bard, warrior, sage, king, merchant, priest, or slave. 

As a free gift and guerdon for their zeal, 

God (ever honored and revered be His 

Name) to the formative angels gave the world 

They had wrought out of darkness, and adorned 

With every living miracle ; and man, 

As head and end of all its dignities, 

In delegated royalty to rule. 

Thus earth, embraced of heaven, and core of space, 

Was plenished, furnished, finished ; and that all 

Both reasons and results of things might see 

Of those creative, arbitrative now, 

High in the unconditioned infinite, 

God set the crowned and dominant laws of life, 

In everlasting senate there to wield 

The jurisdiction of the universe ; 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 107 

Impersonate yet abstract ; and from the first, 
Fixed in the super-solar skies, to all 
Existence as exemplars ; — being, cause, 
Substance, size, quality, action, passion, mode, 
Form, order, change and harmony and rest ; 
Duration, timeous and seterne, and space : 
Motion, development, vital energy ; 
Will, intellect, perception, various sense ; 
The bounded and the infinite. Progress, there, 
Majestic compensation, royal right, 
Affection, instinct, reason, virtue, bliss ; 
Tall-sceptred law, and loin-girt liberty ; 
For as defect is, so is freedom ; fate ; 
Perfection pure and death-enduring life ; 
The purgatorial strife, love-closed ; the war 
"Whose end is Heaven's inviolable peace ; 
All summed, self-seen and sanctified, in soul, 
Whose union with the unity divine 
Creator and created conciliates, 
Concluding all things in its boundless curve. 
Night, Nature's rule, and great exception, light, 
Prone gravity, and vast inertia grown 
One with her seat ; attraction, with the smile 
Fadeless ; repulse, death-destined ; ill and good, 
Arch-gerents of God's throne, surrounded all. 



108 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

While close below the throne bright Nature, there, 

Perpetual maid, perpetual mother-bride, 

Sits, gladdening in her splendid offspring spread 

Through starry space, indigenous to heaven ; 

Of seed divine, blest heirs of deity. 

Angels and spirit hosts of human strain, 

Bright levies of the light, in myriads massed, 

All sate in silent service, till one soul, 

Tuneful and luminous as a singing star, 

Stepped into light, and in the immarbled ear 

Of the convergent infinite, sang of God 

Larklike his lone lay. Then a choir the same 

In stately revolution traced, truth-taught, 

Of power project through all effluxive spheres, 

To the coelestial refuse of this orb, 

In a perduring emblem all the heavens 

Still study with their centre-searching eyes. 

For in the great progression of the whole, 

An ever falling fall and rising rise, 

Of men and angels, takes perpetual place, 

Up even unto the pre-seraphic thrones ; 

For the foundations of the abysmal world 

Are laid in imperfection, and the all 

The purifying pain of fire divine 

Must pass through, in its holy reascent 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 109 

To the supreme perfection of pure cause. 
For the time was when God was God alone 
And nothing but God was. He then withdrew 
A portion of His essence, in that space, 
Girt by the infinite, the world became ; 
Contrast with its creator, but a point ; 
A point ideal child of nothingness. 

These things in vision God the angels showed ; 

Whereat they trembled and were troubled ; still 

Earthwards rewinging with prospective pride, 

They meditated pure delights, and reigned 

In thought triumphant, independent gods. 

The angels, thus, launched each on his own wild 

will, 
Apportioned all among them, 'stablishing 
In various countries variant roots of men, 
Giants and dwarves and iEthiop manikins, 
And pygmies ; (these the tall indignant cranes, 
Angered by broken treaties, drove and drowned 
In sea-pools ; first of victories marine :) 
And those in just majestic medium made ; 
All somewhat diverse ; all assemblant still ; 
Whence ray the lines and brotherhoods of man : 
The sea-born seed, too, earth-born, mountain-born, 



110 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Titans and Cyclops, Gog and Magog, sons 

So called of gods, Corineus, Corcoran, 

And those, Hrimthursar hight, who norwards held 

Frore Jotunheim, contemning gods and men ; 

The Anakim and iEmim of old writ, 

And Og the king's sires, of Talmudic fame ; 

And those in sundry lands and legends known, 

Whom Herakles or Rustam, or Antar, 

The sainted seven, or prince of Frank romance, 

By Dhami, or Durlindana, deathful brands, 

Reft of their slaughterous souls and hurled to hell ; 

Or those who from Ierne through deep sea, 

By long basaltic jetty, and pillared pier, 

Whose columns, capped with crystal, thick as canes 

In Javan jungle, stand, sought sure access 

To Albyn's kingly clans, and fate-stoned throne ; 

Or those, who in Loegria, or the Lionnese 

(Inundate now for ever), or on shores 

Armoric, in chivalric volumes sung, 

In towers of brass abode, or burnished steel, 

That all the region round illumed, with throng 

Of damsels dungeoned, and brave knights unhorsed, 

Fire-breathing dragons guardians of their gates ; 

But all, in fine, by some proud paladin 

Of table round, or peer imperial, quelled. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. Ill 

Especial spots choosing for pristine tribes, 

They sank the sites of cities ; after reared, 

By such portentous architects as built 

Louqsor, Medina Thabou, all that rests 

Of hundred-palaced Thebes ; the columned maze 

Of either Karnak, Gallic, or of Kham ; 

And that once built, men say, in Arab wilds, 

By great Shedad, city occult, whose walls 

Towered in alternate tiers of silver and of gold ; 

Where bright Herat, city of roses, lights 

With dome and minaret the landskip green ; 

Damasek old, old Byblos, or Babel; 

Or Tchelmmar; or Baalbek; or where Balkh, 

Mother of cities, murally encrowned, 

Mourns ; or Thibetian L'hassa, templed seat 

Of an incarnate Deity, where still 

Mix Shamans and the Lama's lieges; those 

Urging the stars, these, with machine-made prayers 

Their transmigrative god ; so shaming earth 

One of the beaming brotherhood of stars, 

But all alike weak in the ^Eternal hand ; 

These, by coelestials learned, were they who piled, 

Progressive from the Aleutians to the Basque, 

Oracular Logan and Main ambre ; these 

Who, twixt the vales of salt and vulgar gold, 



112 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Not far from Guadalupe's aurifluous stream, 

(Richer than rubied Oxus, azure-cliffed,) 

That westward seeks gray ocean's barren brine, 

Mysterious domes, in matted forests hid, 

Builded ; and then evanished ; elsewhere, those, 

Who heaped the cross-famed fire-fanes of Palenque, 

And towers so high she eagles nest thereon ; 

Copan and Zapatero and Uwfmal ; 

Or vast Cholula's terraced pyramid ; 

Or Subtiaba's palaces, the seats, 

Cities and holds of royalties unknown 

(More numerous, maybe, than those named in song 

Of proud Fardusi, Paradisal bard) ; 

The unrecorded Dynasts of old days, 

Who, in some holy and archaic tongue, 

On altars graved high anaglyphs, and gave 

Divinest meaning to each natural form ; 

Thus did the immortal angels, while of man 

And earth forethoughtful and inspired of God 

(Exalted be His name and glorified) ; 

One city, the dark city of the dead, 

Men founded for themselves, and furnished fast 

With skeleton foliage of the tree of life, 

And stony leaves dropped from the book of death. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 113 

But lo ! all light must some time suffer eclipse ; 
If light and darkness freely coexist. 
AH power corrupts the potent, not constrained 
By special grace prevenient. Thus they ceased, 
Those once most virtuous angels, step by step, 
Scarcely perceptible, half unconsciously, 
From that pure will and primal excellence 
Whereto they were connate ; seeking, at first, 
Their own names, to the tribes each emperor'd, 
To magnify, and so become their gods ; 
In lieu of teaching man the one supreme 
To worship, God ; whom all alike were bound 
To honor and adore. Through this they fell ; 
(No longer kind to man, whate'er to God ;) 
The angels fell, and drew down earth with them. 

The fall is universal in all spheres, 
For finite spirit, wherever tasked to keep 
The counsels of divine perfection, fails. 
The starry story of one primal pair, 
Twin pillars to the portals of life's fane, 
Or free-born deities, free as stars are fixed, 
And the ccelestial serpent, sun-conceived, 
Wants not, where'er is life ; but whether graved 
On Elohistic columns rent from rocks, 
8 



114 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

The missals of millennial patriarchs ; 

On palm-foil writ, or purple pulp of flowers, 

Illumined with all literal loveliness ; 

Or virgin vellum, rose-gilded and perfumed, 

Shrined in the bosom of some cloistered saint, 

The same sad tale perpetually commands 

The astral annals of the universe. 

Nymph-haunted stream, and river deified, 
Hallowed in after eld as from their hands, 
Angelic and creative, risen, vain rites 
Received ; with lamplets studded, and with wreaths 
Votive encrowned ; and consecrated flowers ; 
While mounds of worship, sainted by the sun, 
And natural altars, starwise dedicate, 
Joyed in high names of generative light. 
Ages of water, alternate with fixe ; 
Chaos and aether; the invisible heavens ; 
Earth's seras, and the periods of pure air, 
Commemorate were in terms divinely apt ; 
While over all ranked preexistent speech, 
Conceptive wisdom, and seternal mind. 



But gradually, a separate interest . ./.-.: ■: 
Insinuate once betwixt themselves and God, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 115 

Among each other hostile interests sprang, 

And schemes of empire basely politic ; 

One name of God each took, or masculine 

Or feminine, for deity hath both, 

Begetting and conceiving and self-sprung, 

Some title of divinity, unto which 

None saving God had right ; that so they might, 

As substituted lords, the rites receive 

Due to the alone JEternal ; and His name 

Blot from the hearts and memories of mankind. 

Such were the Lord of Heaven, Baal Semim, whom 

Phoenicia worshipped, and, in sequent years, 

Those in the holy island of the west, 

As lord of light, of fate, of wealth, of power, 

Of gifts, of glories ; such the father of fire, 

Hephaistos, or Ifestus, whom by Nile 

The wise ^Egyptian honored (he who reigned 

Long ages ere the cometary earth 

The stars disturbed with presages of woe, 

To Heaven's great family, in herself to be 

Concentrate and accomplished to the death, 

As in a fiery whirlpool) first of gods, 

Ere yet gave time one hint of dawn ; the same 

Whom later Greeks named architect of heaven, 



116 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

And in oracular hymns, Orphic and old, 
Dictated by the sun, all-conquering hailed ; 
Such was the lord of waters, league-invoked, 
"Whose witness was the everlasting well ; 
Hormuzd or Ilus such, who when he had made 
Espendermad, fair tutelar of earth, 
Khourdad, and all the rest, her brethren bright, 
The blessed Amschaspands, and lit the stars 
In the sethereal hyaline, himself 
^Eternal sire of light, his strength for that 
One future, final, all composing strife 
Saved 'gainst the lord of evil (he, of Yezd, 
Prudentially still worshipped), from the world 
Routed to be, and thenceforth rooted out 
For evermore, with threefold thunder-fires ; 
Such Zeus, the living one, the saviour, hight ; 
Such ancient Kronos crowned king of time, 
God of the golden age, the heavenly state, 
Monarch of space and all celestial orbs ; 
And he who, grasping loftier title still, 
Styled himself Heaven, the fountain of all light ; 
Astarte such, the star-nymph, who in gloom 
Of groves delighted, sacred where to death 
She might her Hadean lord at full beweep ; 
Whom Asian tribes Shemiram, Mother of Heaven, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 117 

And 'mong their mingled gods the Ansarij hailed 

Lady of light ; she moonlike round the earth 

Errant, picked up a fallen star at Tyre ; 

Then o'er the altar stretched her sceptral cross, 

Her pre-millennial cross, thrice-hallowed sign, 

Vital, and elemental, and divine, 

And consecrated it ; — the Dove-queen such, 

Who boated o'er the ocean in the moon, 

And silvered every billow as she passed ; 

Such Viricocha, deity of the sea, 

Adored by kingly Incas, and the courts 

Of solar virgins blooming ; — such 'mid isles 

Hid in Pacific deeps, Moooi, stretched 

Full length, gigantic shorer up of earth ; 

High title his, sustainer of the world. 

But soon in angel breasts ill passions bred : 
Oppression followed rivalry, too soon 
Symbols and signs of terror were, in place 
Of love, God's own and holiest title, ta'en ; 
And the divine to finite passion changed ; 
Then first the primal lamb, the shepherd's joy ; 
Next, human victims bled ; and passed the babe 
Through baptism of blood and fire, to peace. 
Such pre-atonement naught ; whilst stormiest wars 



118 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Angel with angel waged, and god with god ; 

Each striving most to broaden his domain ; 

Propelling his adorers to invade, 

Root out, and ruin all of faith opposed. 

The heavens were rent with lightnings and the fields 

Of interjacent space, as the high powers, 

Now heated to malignity, oft closed 

In thunderous conflict, till the fire-breathed hills 

Grew iced with fear ; and quaking, earth beneath 

Reeked with the blood of brethren, brethren-slain. 

The angel of the ocean-flowing Nile, 

And he the heights of Lebanon who held, 

And he who, where Hidekkel gulfwards darts, 

Ruled with an absolute crown, for ages strove 

With changeable success, and interchanged 

Mishap, but each evolving changeless woe ; 

So too the Persian Angel and the Greek, 

Contending, fanes and altars were defiled ; 

And myriads of belligerent worshippers, 

Through vain ambition of immortals, slain. 

One thing was common to all nations ; woe. 

Sin, vice, and luxury, with their flower-wreathed rods, 

Reigned o'er the reckless nations ; life on life, 

Made, like that cruel tower by fair Shirauz, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 119 

Of living souls impacted, limed with blood, 
Time's generations mounts of misery. 

Not all, nathless, was blank ; nor blight : to man 

One sweet exemption, by God's grace, pertained ; 

One gift diviner than the angels gave, 

By them o'erlooked, not all their mutual wrath 

Could ruin or pervert ; love, naught but love ; 

Parental, filial, conjugal, divine. 

Life's armies were recruited still by love ; 

Fond hearts still grew affection, as fields corn ; 

Still bloomed and fruited with an inner fife, 

And vintage of delight ; still youthful breasts, 

Reciprocally fired, imparted joy, 

Imported rapture ; tenderest converse still, 

Sweet as the whisperings of imblossomed trees, 

Or the low lispings of night's silvery seas, 

Lived on the lips of lovers, then as now, 

By fount or mead, or wandering, moon-beguiled, 

'Neath tall white cliffs, along shores shadowless. 

But of all spirits who mortals most misled, 

(0 bold, blasphemous, legendary He !) 

Head of the angel race, prime demiurge, 

Was he who o'er the wandering Hebrews swayed, 



120 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

(What time from Ninus' wrath and Asshur's land, 
And city — itself a realm — of Nin-Evech, 
And the daemoniac fires of the Chaldees, 
Came forth the father of the faithful flock,) 
Pretentious, proud, prohibiting brotherhood. 

For ages this continued ; till, at last, 

In the divine accomplishment of times, 

The mind of man (racked with immortal grief), 

To which in vain philosophy had lent 

Her balm Lethsean, and the ignorant hordes, 

Slaves to obscurest idols or impure, 

Buddhists or heathen of all faiths uncouth, 

Which cloud earth's fairer half, (from Baltic bay 

Tideless, and golden gap, where Frank or Lapp 

With Meshech's mighty seed justly contend, 

Athwart to hills of heaven, and southmost shores 

Unbroken, of peninsular Malay, 

Siam, Borneo, and the scattered flock 

Of islets trending towards the Austral pole,) 

Sought refuge in barbaric apathy : — 

Men cried aloud to God. 

God pitied man : 
And in sublime compassion gazed below. 
The eyes of the JEternal, and thine, Christ ! 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 121 

First, highest of all JEons, the Divine 
Intelligence, met, midmost in the heavens ; 
And mercy to the semi-angel man 
Flowed from the vision. 

Men in secret prayed. 
Not all that Indian sages could educe 
From their Yedamic founts of knowledge rare, 
Fourfold, as in the garden of delight ; 
Nor Konfutse, nor Gaudma, souls austere, 
From Buddhist scrolls, nor Tao, son of truth ; 
Nor they who Zaradean rites ensued, 
As after fall and flood comes final fire ; 
Nor they who in the city of the sun 
The fateful words of Trismegist revered ; 
Nor they who, smit with curious care, would note, 
Plucking the foliage of that fatal flower, 
The oracles Sibylline, willed of God ; 
Whether Tiresias' daughter, Theban maid, 
Or Delphic Daphne, or the sun-inspired, 
By divine counsel voiced the heavenly verse ; 
As some in after days Yirgilian leaves, 
Homeric tome, or scripture sacrosanct ; 
Nor who from Delian shrine, or Klarian fane, 
Rede sought of holiest ambiguity, 
Self-guarded, two-edged, waving either way ; 



122 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Nor the wise seven of Greece ; nor Thracian seer, 

Skilled in all lore ccelestial and arcane, 

Who pierced the Hadean shades, and his bright bride, 

Though serpent-stung, death seized, had half redeemed ; 

(Alas ! not half; man's whole redemption lay 

Sole, and to be, still in the breast of God ;) 

Nor he the white-stoled wanderer of far lands, 

Who first the name of wisdom's lover claimed ; 

Nor he, of Hyperborean fame, who round 

The world on golden arrow, white winged, sped ; 

Nor grove-priest, opening (from the ship of earth, 

Or manual mound, the judgment seat of kings, 

Of twice ten roods of land the base immense) 

The sacred secrets of the earth and skies ; 

From magic or from mystic orgies, none 

Could whisper to the world one saving spell 

That might the house of death illume ; or raise 

Even in life the soul to hope and peace, 

Or look for ultimate union with the light. 

Nor priest, nor bard, nor mage from secret source 
Or patent, Ogham, nor the ghostlier runes ; 
Nor rolls of birchen bark with mighty lay 
Of divination, graven in branched signs, 
Ere dim tradition ; nor from tablets rich 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 123 

With Auscan god-lore and augurial rites 

Of volant fowl ; from cane nor palm leaf drenched 

With sacred scents, in gilded Pali penned ; 

Sungskrit, or arrowy Zend wherein the sun's 

Vicarious rites were taught ; nor Arian, tongue 

Of Asian eld trilingual ; nor, unnamed, 

The foreworld's infant speech, haply entombed, 

With archives of the earth's initial throne, 

Below black Babel's thunder-thwarted pile ; 

Nor Arach, arkite city of the moon, 

Whose golden crowned ghosts shall all precede, 

Kingly, at doom, though Persargadae's graves, 

Roman and Puss, or Norman's vaulted tomb 

Yield up their dominant shadows to the light ; 

Nor where in alabastrine halls, approached 

Through forms cherubic, of omnipresent wing, 

As in Kouyunjik once, or in Khorsabad, 

On sculptured walls, behold the king, with wine 

Divining in the presence of his gods, 

Mingles his arrows and accepts his fate ; 

Tamul, nor Devanagari, writs divine ; 

Nor Himyaritic wisdom, (pointed to 

Of old by patriarch Ayoob ; type of man, 

His seed entire, death slain, regenerate rise,) 

Rock-scored, whose shadows frown o'er Sheba's sands ; 



124 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Nor the symbolic meaning wrapped in stones 

Snake-headed, volumed over leagues of down ; 

Nor earliest earth-mound, reared before all walls 

By stalwarth savages, in arts of life 

Less skilled than feats of death; and who, where 

now, 
Far east and west, resurgent cities stand, 
Hounded the hills ; some vast and simple faith 
Rudely divine, more than our chiselled creeds, 
Embracing, as though fallen ripe from heaven ; 
Nor rifled secrets of palatial tombs 
Hearted in Lydian barrows ; nor could those 
Sepulchral hills sodden with blood of steed, 
Henchman, or immolated slave (far round 
Earth heaves with tomblets, as the sea with waves) 
'Mid wilds Kathaian ; unprofaned as yet 
By art or avarice ; nor those mightier mounds 
Whereon two days, from sunrise to sundown, 
The warrior shepherd shall both herd and flock, 
Content, depasture ; underfoot, the Khan, 
(God's shadow ; brother, maybe, of the moon ; 
Sole refuge of a wretched universe,) 
Sceptred, and swathed within his thin gold shroud, 
Sleeps, doubtless, sound ; though o'er that sacred head 
Shrill sings the boor ; he, striding round the base, 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 125 

In meditative measurement, and round, 

Twirls bis long lance, contemptuous of the time; 

Nor astral oracles the wise might find 

On the sun's house, or mansion of the moon, 

Inscribed in letters of serenest light ; 

From none of these dead signs came life, came hope, 

To man's expectant spirit, nor relief; 

The spectral mysteries of the aeternal life 

Were not to be explored nor excavate. 

Nor Rabbin versed in Kabalistic lore, 

In potent ciphers and in names of might, 

Aheieh, Matzpatz, CEmeth, On, Elhai, 

Aishi, and Baali, Netzah, Agla, Tzour ; 

Or that which faintly heired the cloud of light, 

(Whence God of old by gems spake, and His truth 

Responsive gleamed from every glance of fire,) 

The echoing daughter of the spirit voice ; 

In spheral talismans and starry seals 

The which on vital, vegetal, mental worlds 

Do stamp their influence through the elements ; 

Nor who, in Babylonian gloss profound, 

Taught the iEdenic mysteries of man 

And maness ; how in union infinite, 

The fair asterne, the loveliness supreme, 



126 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

The heavenly man, the tree divine of life, 

Whose branches, spread invisibly through space, 

Fruit but in heavenly paradise ; pure cause 

Of all the beauty of the universe, 

And all the vital harmonies wherewith 

The light investured sun is resonant, 

Mates with the queen of heaven, the spouse of light, 

Mistress of mysteries, and bride of life, 

The golden ark of faith, the gate of God, 

And temple of the king ; how in this world 

Man is the representative of the word, 

And of the spirit maiden ; in the word, 

How woman typeth man, man God ; in art 

Of channel, chariot, fabric, and the twain 

And thrice ten ways of wisdom, and the ports 

Fifty of all intelligence ; though skilled 

To excess, who taught the alphabet of life 

Angelical and sidereal and mundane, 

The holy outbranchings of divinity, 

And virtues of the tenfold veils of God, 

Stretched from the all essential infinite, 

To animastic orders and ourselves, 

Earth being last of spheres, of being, man ; 

Not such, pride-blind, could recognize the true 

Divinity to come in lowliest guise ; 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 127 

But for some crowned and sword-girt conqueror, 
Throne-born, and in a golden cradle rocked, 
Awaiting, they awaited ; wait they may. 

The angels would not, and man could not save. 
Re-track their steps the angels would not ; nor 
From holiest truths eliminate the false, 
And thus with God's, man's mind re-harmonize ; 
But as, misplaced of purpose, blent their rites 
That so from mystery, mystery still might come, 
And no solution, no salvation, self 
Sufficing, stand within the fane of day. 

Virtue and vice were preached of without end ; 

But as in theories of life men grew 

More skilled and perfect, so in practick worse. 

That vice is hateful, virtue heavenly, all 

Or most confessed ; but knew not whence nor why, 

Nor how to shun the one, the other win. 

For who of the ccelestial life could tell 

As ascertained, attainable, or lovely, 

To beings of nature mixed and finite powers ; 

And if to all, or learned or simple, free ? 

To many, or to few ? 

Not he who deemed 



128 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Water the origin of things mundane ; 

Not he who fire ; who air ; who atoms held ; 

Nor he who that the All, aeterne, was God ; 

Not he who first from heaven to earth deduced 

Philosophy ; and then from earth to heaven 

Traced the soul's path by immortality ; 

And, like a god disguised, died as he lived ; 

Nor he, the sometime slave, surnamed divine, 

Rich in ^Egyptian wisdom and all lore 

Hellenic, who in Academus taught 

The teacher of earth's conqueror, and the hearts 

Of tyrant kings softened by gratitude ; 

Nor they who in the Porch oft dreamed aloud 

Their passionless figment of humanity ; 

Nor he who in the Garden vainly taught 

Pure pleasure as man's truest mark and end ; 

Whose words the very hearts corrupted they 

Aimed but to purify ; not he who all things scorned 

Not he who doubted all ; not even they, 

Manly and moderate, honest friends of truth, 

Who all the tenable points of others chose 

And in one system starred. 

Nor better fared 
The dubious mind, intent elsewhere on truth, 
With the self-righteous formalist who prized 



A. SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 129 

The law minutest, if Mosaic, more 

Than justice or divinest charities ; 

Or those, who utter nothing after death 

Argued, against the instinct of mankind ; 

And so besotted, tyrannously denied 

The being of all angels, theirs except, 

Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and all else ; 

Or such as in ascetic penance pined 

'Mid rocks, wilds, caves, their useless lives away. 

Law seemed not that man needed ; from the birth 
Historic of all empires to that hour, 
Menes and Minos, Numa and Manou ; 
And wise Zamolxis, legislative slave, 
Who after three years death his life redeemed ; 
Sub-slaving to achieve his country's weal ; 
Zaleucus and Lycurgus and Solon, 
The lights of ages, and Rome's tables twelve, 
Had done what in them lay, of human force, 
To better negatively man's defaults, 
And social sins and civic crimes decrease ; 
Injustice all forbidding ; but one mean, 
"Whereby reunion with Divinity 
(Which failing, law, philosophy, and faith 
Echoes of echoes were and shades of shades) 
9 



130 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Might be accomplished, seemed unknown, unhoped. 

To some in every land, of soul reborn, 

The gifts of wisdom, light and peace pertained ; 

But who should teach the multitudinous mass ; 

What truths unfold, and what more fine reserve ; 

The wisest men were doubtful ; and believed 

The ultimate indifference of all deeds, 

All thoughts, all motives, all intents ; the best 

Were erring guides ; the worst were all but all. 

The world was one senigma ; life appeared 

A bridge of groans across a stream of tears. 

Again the giant world-sphinx, winged with air, 
Sun-faced, star-maned, tailed with the rolling sea, 
And breasted as beseems the dam of all 
Who nourisheth men and beasts, her riddle reads ; 
And, this time, she the knot divine propounds, 
(For sage and priest confess them, both, estranged,) 
Of how may God with man be reconciled ? 
Who solves earns well the purple ; and thenceforth 
With ominous and curseworthy glory wears 
His gold-spiked crown. But ah ! his end is woe. 
He, to his fate divine, uneyes himself in vain ; 
His tomb is in time's chasm ; and the long 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 131 

Oracular thunders further quest forefend. 

In every generation of his kind, 

Hero, or priest, or bard, or sage, or king, 

There lives but one can solve. Now all were dumb. 

But now that Messianic times drew nigh, 

In sweet fulfilment of coelestial love, 

Paternal, son-like, spiritual, typed 

In rites Saturnian, golden-tided years ; 

God the most High, compassionating the state 

Of wretched mortals, thus with reason blessed, . 

But with material nature cursed, devoid 

Of guide infallible, or standard pure, 

And ground beneath the crashing rivalries 

Of disobedient angels, sent from heaven 

His Christ, our Saviour ; that He, being born 

In union consubstantive with the man 

Jesus, true knowledge of the Lord of Gods, 

And faith in Him alone, He might retrieve 

To earth's bewildered nations ; and the reign 

O'erthrow of angel kings who thralled the world 

With their most fatal misrule ; and in front, 

The haughty and presumptuous spirit which claimed 

Allegiance from the patriarch's house, who led 

By him, from Goshen, in C'naan abode. 



132 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Allied to our mortality came Christ, 

Therefore in godly wise, and humbly great ; 

Foretold by stars ; typed by the winged sun ; 

His life one long perpetual miracle 

Upon the sun-clad earth ; from lip and hand 

Eradiating blessings like the sun. 

His words were as a well, profoundly clear, 

And deeplier drawn, the purer, more of life. 

Mankind with inexpressive gladness marked 

His daily walk ; touched his health-issuing robe, 

And lived renewed ; the changing dead his grave 

Quitted at one appeal ; sinners, their sin 

Owned, were forgiven ; believed, and were in heaven. 

Dreading the whole defection of his state, 

The angel of the Hebrews, (chosen race 

As they o'erweeningly misdeemed, so taught 

By their intolerant warden,) moved with wrath, 

And now inspiring malice in the hearts 

Of thousands, his fanatic devotees, 

Bade treachery seize and slay the marvellous man. 

Thousands revered and loved him ; one betrayed. 
(Treason most high, most base, most monstrous this, 
To mar the majesty divine of Heaven ! ) 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 133 

Burning with envy and all ill passions, born 

Of man's original corruption, fixed 

In fatal flesh, they bound, mocked, scourged, and slew 

Jesus, the glory of earth ; in that dread deed 

Of human hate, fulfilling love divine ; 

But Christ, first JEon, the Intelligence, 

Impassible, immortal, 'scaped their toils 

(A fiery struggle, fatal to the foe) 

By virtue of Divinity, and rose 

Into the highest heavens, where now He sits, 

The head of all existence, light of God. 

For God deposed the angels ; and consigned 
To purifying penitence ; their seals 
Of sovereignty He all annulled, and they, 
Bidden into black oblivion, cast ; as since, 
In mountain tarn volcanic, throne and crown, 
Sceptre, and aN regalia, golden gauds, 
The imperial pagan of the west implunged ; 
In time to come, some needy fisherman, 
At close of day, with his last throw perchance, 
Shall joyful net a mass — may burnish yet — 
Weed-webbed and foul, a despot's diadem ; 
But He who did the angels, calm, discrown, 
Alone can give, again, their primal power. 



134 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

But he and his, who held, that in that hour 

Of death (hopeful and holy now) thou, "Lord ! 

Thy bodily semblance graftedst on the frame 

And face of other, to thy cross subject ; 

Oh ! he who thus conceived thee, knew thee not. 

Thy human severing from thy state divine, 

Son of the living God ; sole son ; and sire 

Of the seternity to come, thou first 

And meekest of all martyrs, Christ ; the crown 

Of saints, the joy of angels ; of all life 

The glory and the blessing, fount and end ; 

Whose blessed blood hath whitened all the world, 

And clarified creation, conquered death. 

Thus, saith the spiritual legendist, 
They who in Him believe and do His will, 
Well willing and well doing to all men, 
Shall after death ascend to Him, and see 
(Leaving their bodies in the pestilent mass 
Of matter, whence originally they came) 
His Father's face ; the God o'er all supreme. 
But, on expiry, the rebellious soul 
Shall other bodies enter, time by time, 
Till it confess the truth and trust in Christ. 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 135 

All things are intermediate ; God (His name 

For aye be praised and magnified) alone 

Is first and last ; creation circling midst. 

The pre-existent life of spirit-spheres 

Is that of preparation ; on the earth, 

Probation ; after death, purgation ; all 

Begins, all ends, all mediates sole in God. 

This purgatory everlasting is ; 

The fires oeternal, not the punishment ; 

Age-lasting and life-lasting such alone ; 

For so long as a man hath lived in sin, 

So long the spirit suffers for the sense ; 

So long for worst offence he may be pained ; 

So long his inward shadow fined with fire ; 

So long remorse, as with a burning wrasp 

In poison steeped, shall bite his quivering heart, 

Till, blanched and purified, sin's pantherine spots 

Vanish in whiteness as the wool of lambs. 

The virtues and all holiest sympathies, 

Preponderating upwards, meet in Heaven ; 

And in God's bosom centre. And thus love, 

The heart's deep gulf-stream, that, with warmer wave 

Sun-gilded, soothes the abysses of our life, 

And tempers, with its mild divinity, 



136 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

The universal breath all, partly, breathe ; 
Hasting to compass its coelestial end, 
With a serene progression, makes us feel 
In loving God the soul reseeks its source ; 
Being to being answering, name to name. 
And every evil passion which man's soul, 
With flesh engendering, fostered while in life, 
Becomes, in death, a living fiend ; to scourge 
With patricidal and Briarean hand, 
Its guilty parent, shrinking, shrieking, lost : — 
But vanquished, grows an angel, bleached by fire, 
Attracting to salvation in the heavens. 

Now, all the ills men bear are caused by sins, 
Their woes are penalties imposed by God 
(All hallowed be His name and aye extolled) ; 
And each man suffereth, on his own behalf, 
What proves God's righteous judgment for offence. 

O, vainly, vainly from the contrite soul, 
Stabbed with the golden dagger of remorse 
For sin, pours forth the penitential prayer ; 
Death were too cheap a pain ; man's life a fine 
Too trivial to appease God's proud revenge, 
But for thine infinite atonement, Christ ! 



A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 137 

And it comports with reason ; the less ill 
Men do, less will they suffer ; the more good 
Men do to men on earth, the more will God 
Do unto them in heaven ; for He repays 
Always an hundred, ofttimes, thousand fold. 

Wherefore should all men purge the soul of sin, 

The conscience of all criminal desire ; 

Concupiscence, ire, envy, hatred, sloth ; 

The mind of all perturbing passion ; heart 

Of all propensity which will not bear 

Heaven's fullest, holiest light ; whereof by Christ, 

Immortal mediator of the world, 

Man may become the blessed recipient ; 

And heaven be full of souls, as air of motes 

Prismatic, the vivacious seed of worlds. 

So with the godlike angels too, at last ; 

Atoning, by obedience unto God, 

(0 doubly blessed and trebly worshipped name, 

Of all in heaven, or earth, or under earth !) 

For selfish rule, inexpiable else, 

And penitent exile from affairs mundane, 

They, their asbestine expurgation passed, 

Exalted by progression infinite, 



138 A SPIRITUAL LEGEND. 

Through conduct, aspiration, and intent 
Thrice recreate, shall rise ; and round God's throne, 
Where, o'er the infinite and immaculate skies, 
The rainbow bends its everlasting beams, 
Not drops of water, but translucent stars 
Existent solely in the JEternal ray, 
Wherein the spirits, glorified, of time 
Cosequal with the universe abide ; 
.Shall they, bright guardians, stand; like dear to God 
Both man and angel kind. 

And when, i' th' end, 
Unnumbered times, duration unbethought, 
Have passed, shall God (His name be ever blest 
And sanctified) another world causate ; 
The powers of all spirits shall aggrandize ; 
Make them wise, happy, humble, good, content ; 
In every thought, design, desire, shall reign, 
And glorify Himself unboundedly ; 
Into their hands all mortal destinies give, 
And bid them rule and bless wherever stretch His skies. 

Thus he, the legend spiritual who feigned. 



A FAIRY TALE. 



A FAIRY TALE. 



Oxce in days of yore a little Princess, who had sum- 
mers seen 

Scarcely seven, and was christened by the holy name 
Christine, 

Found herself, at eve, disporting in a fairy ring of green. 

She had left the kingly castle ; left her sire's and moth- 
er's side, 

Left the banquet, where her brother feasted with his 
royal bride ; 

And had rambled to the forest valley, 'neath the sum- 
mer moon, 

Where she crossed the charmed circle, aught thereof 
unknowing. Soon, 

Overwearied there she rested, wishing what might come 
to pass, 



142 A FAIRY TALE. 

When by chance her hand alighted on a tuft of clover- 
grass. 

This she grasped, a tiny handful : — ah ! Saint Mary ! 

what she saw ! — 
Mounted on their milk-white palfreys, issuing from the 

shady shawe, 
Came the Fairies, caracolling gayly as they passed 

along ; 
Then, dismounting, closed around her in a bright and 

joyous throng ; 
Ladylings and lordlings dancing, piping, harping, full of 

song. 
Clad in robes of silken silver, golden gossamer a few, 
Decked with jewels bright as starlets, bright as berries, 

bright as dew ; 
Some in kirtle, scarf, and doublet, all of verdant forest 

hue. 

Lovers there she saw, arm-twining, in the wild wood's 

shadowy slade ; 
There, some woful knight was kneeling at the feet of 

haughty maid ; 
Here was feasting, there was music ; many a cunning 

prank was played. 



A FAIRY TALE. 143 

Suddenly, the stateliest of them, he that most a monarch 

seemed, 
(Cap of crimson his, and mantle like an emerald that 

beamed,) 
When he spied the gentle maiden, smiling on the merry 

scene ; 
Ho ! my lords and ladies ! cried he, wist ye who with 

us hath been ? 
Lo ! a mortal stands among us ; fairer than a fairy 

she; 
Let us speak with her a moment ; questioning belongs 

to me. 

Straight the jocund throng desisted from their pastime 

and their play ; 
While the king of all the fairies to the childling thus 

'gan say : — 

Lovely mortal! wilt thou, wilt thou quit with us thy 

childhood's bowers, 
And in our enchanted Eden wander through a world of 

flowers ? 
All delights that thou hast dreamed of, gathered there 

shall be, and thine ; 
Flowers that fade not, games that end not ; skies that 

alway mildliest shine ; 



144 A FAIRY TALE. 

Kneaded cates of amber honey, and the rosebud's dewy 

wine : 
"Wreaths of jewels, combs of silver, beads and bracelets 

all of gold, 
And a diamond girdle round thee; mine I give thee 

now, behold ! 
Bowls of rubies thou shalt sip from, and from crystal 

tables dine ; 
And, at eve, on lily leaves, and mingled violets recline ; 
Wilt thou with me, sweet one, tell me ! King, she an- 
swered, I am thine. 
All the fairy court with rapture danced when thus they 

heard her say ; 
Noble chieftain, child of beauty, let us haste, they cried, 

away! 

Seal the covenant first, quoth Oberon ; and a magic cup 

of wine 
Straight was brought him, when the king bethought him 

of the charm divine, 
"Which the eyes of Life had opened, to perceive their 

secret line. 
Deep within the rosy goblet he the fourfold leaflet 

dipped, 
Drank thereof, and to the damsel gave it ; daintily she 

sipped. 



A FAIRY TALE. 145 

Then to horse ; the gallant knighthood lift their ladies 

to the sells ; 
Every steed was shod with silver, every bridle hung 

with bells, 
Like the lilies of the valley, only all of silver. Swells 
Soft the moonlit air with strains aforetime never heard ; 
More sweet than tone of nymph or muse, or god, to both 

preferred. 

So they ambled on until they reached a green and 

grove-crowned hill. 
Which, without a gate, they entered, opening at the 

monarch's will : 
Then the portals closed upon her ; woe is me for that 

dear child, 
'Mid the insubstantial regions of the fairies thus beguiled. 

Streams of bubbling gold flowed round her ; fountains 

flung their diamond spray ; 
O'er the fields a pearl-dew glistened ; polished loadstone 

paved the way ; 
Trees were leafed with golden florins; daisies chimed 

like silver crowns ; 
Musical and odorous breezes breathed across the velvet 

downs. 

10 



146 A FAIRY TALE. 

Soon they neared the regal palace twinkling in the 
aery dyes. 

Lilac, pearl, and beryl blended, of that country's sunless 
skies ; 

While the fay-queen and her ladies, with their flower- 
robed damsels fair, 

Came forthright to greet her crowned spouse, and royal 
guestling there. 

From the centre of the high dome swung a topaz solar 
bright, 

Which through all the palace darted gleams of glad and 
glorious light ; 

Emerald lamplets ranked around it, tempered this with 
cooler ray ; 

While, without, the welkin poured one pale and ever- 
dawning day. 

There the feast was flowing ever; stream-like music 
ceaseless played ; 

There the dance was alway weaving ; minstrels chant- 
ing in the shade ; 

There for aye the chase was bounding over dale and 
hill and plain, 

And fair Christine on hound-high steed the foremost of 
the elfin train. 



A FAIRY TALE. 147 

Still she saddened when she minded of the simple gar- 
lands she 

"Wove of wild rose and of woodbine, with her playmates 
on the lea ; 

And the hazel and brown beech nut which they gath- 
ered from the tree. 

What though clad in jewelled raiment, trilling, tripping, 
day and night, 

What though plyed with queenly dainties, what though 
culling gold-blooms bright, 

Never in the feast delicious, nor the dance's wildering 
whirl, 

Nor the wine-cup's merry orbit, could forget that lonely 
girl 

The ancient hall where dwelled her sire, and where, too, 
from her mother's side, 

She one summer's eve had stolen forth into the forest 
wide. 

Drink the dew, the fairy Fate said, that the poppy lends 
repose, 

Mingled with the fragrant nectar chaliced in the gold- 
en rose. 

Then she drank the draught Lethean from the bowl 
with flowerets crowned, 



148 A FAIRY TALE. 

Flamy flowers, that all remembrance of her past exist- 
ence drowned ; 

Thus, with lustres vainly lapsing, to perpetual childhood 
bound 

Never moon there marked the season ; sun ne'er shad- 
owed forth the time ; 

Years themselves were undistinguished in that soft and 
listless clime. 

Now where mines of gold and silver branch, in many a 

gleamy vein ; 
Through the bosom of the mountain, 'neath the many- 
leagued plain ; 
Where jasper and cornelian clear and alabaster pure, 
And purple spars and glass-bright rocks the glittering 

caves immure, 
She roamed ; and all the virtues learned of every potent 

gem 
Or mystic or medicinal ; all gifts that unto them 
Pertained, of causing love, or hate, or infinite delight, 
Imperial wealth, tyrannic state, long life, and beauty 

bright ; 
These into an armlet stringing, ruby, sapphire, emerald, 

pearl, 
Threaded on the sunny tendril of one desultory curl, 
As an amulet Titania gave to her, the spell-bound girl. 



A FAIRY TALE. 149 

Through the dwarf king's wondrous regions she with 

him delighted strayed ; 
Rings and charms and magic weapons he for her, love- 
smitten, made. 
Blithely oft beneath the seas she roved with mermaids 

from their caves, 
Arched with amber, pearl and ivory roofs, whose floors 

bright coral paves ; 
And oft, too, when the fairy court, for pleasure, or for 

pride, 
Would seek the cooling streams that lave earth's plains 

and meadows wide, 
The water spirits in their arms the darling maid would 

fold, 
And hidden things of years to come mysteriously they 

told; 
There she viewed in crystal vases souls of hapless 

wretches drowned, 
Which from their pellucid prisons she with holy zeal 

unbound ; 
Upward sprang the sprites, with joyful some, and some 

with mournful sound. 
With the sylphs in air she sported; with the golden- 

palaced gnome, 
Earth imbosomed ; or the light-elves in their rainbow- 
clouded home. 



150 A FAIRY TALE. 

Oft times with the Elle-King rode she, in his chariot, 
o'er the main, 

While his martial band, with sea-conchs, blew the war- 
inspiring strain ; 

Then upon the headlands landing, counted o'er the frosty- 
meads, 

Royal droves of great blue kine, lipping the ice-dew of 
weeds. 

'Gainst the fairies of the fire she with tidal spirits 



War ; and earth, and air, and ocean felt how fierce the 
battle raged. 

High she shook her shining falchion, pliant as the rush- 
en plant, 

Falchion her dwarf-lover forged her, hard and bright as 
adamant ; 

Fighting by the Elle-King's side, there she the lord of 
fireland slew ; 

All the hosts of fire were routed; crowned her queen 
the conquering crew ; 

Back to fairyland she hasted ; home her train in triumph 
drew. 

King and spouse majestic welcome gave her, on her 
glad return ; 



A FAIRY TALE. 151 

And a thousand tongues besought that her adventures 
they might learn. 

This she grants ; and lo ! a banquet, by unheard com- 
mand, is seen, 

Instantaneously furnished on the flower-embroidered 
green. 

On the east hand of her liege lord sat the bright, the 
brave Christine; 

On his west, divine Titania, night's incomparable queen ; 

Then the victress told Sir Oberon all she had done, and 
where had been ; 

How from end to end of faerie she had passed, below, 
above, 

Scathless, by the spells the dwarf-king gave her in his 
days of love ; 

How had dealt with Nisses, Noks, and Kobolds, Kelpies, 
Norns, and Trolls ; 

How with Peris fared, and Shadim, Afrits, Ogres, Deevs, 
and Ghouls ; 

She had travelled in the whirlwind ; for no harm to her 
might fall, 

Who had talismans and virtues could enchant or van- 
quish all ; — 

How the Elle-chief's broad dominions scarred by war, 
she, sad, beheld ; 



152 A FAIRY TALE. 

How with hosts of fire they fought, and how the first of 

foes she quelled ; 
How, she said, in God she trusted ; — at that word the 

banquet ceased ; 
Shrieked and vanished all the faerie, save the king who 

bade the feast. 

Silent sate the maid and monarch many a moment, till, 
quoth he, 

Knowest thou not, unhappy child, the woe thou hast 
wrought in faerie ? 

Know'st thou not that by the name which elfin tongue 
hath never passed, 

Whenso uttered, we are scattered, dust-like, by the tem- 
pest's blast ? 

Know'st thou not that we be spirits, doomed to linger 
here, unchanged, 

In the sunless land of Faerie, from the light of heaven 
estranged, 

Till, with promise of salvation, we be blessed by holy 
priest, 

Or some sinless mortal give us hope to be at last re- 
leased ? 

Till the universal judgment we, the viewless sons of 
Eve, 



A FAIRY TALE. 153 

Wander in the hollow under-world, unable to believe, 
Till we hold the great assurance, for the lack whereof 

we grieve. 
Still as we of sin were guiltless, save the sin inherited 
From our mother's first trangression, ere the floods 

abroad were spread, 
He, the great Creator, hid us in the bosom-shades of 

earth, 
And forbade that in the sunlight ever we should journey- 
forth. 

Bounteous is He, said the maiden, of illimitable grace ; 
Nor would He have hid ye here, if good he meant not 
to your race. 

Ah, alas ! then, why delayeth He his merciful com- 
mand? 

Sighed the Fairy ; sooner blossom shall the sceptre in 
my hand ; 

Saying, — in the mould he wildly struck his white and 
star-tipped wand. 

Scarce had he the sad word uttered, when the peeled 

and polished rod 
Bourgeoned forth in buds and blossoms, rooted in the 

mossy sod ; 



154 A FAIRY TALE. 

Lo ! a miracle, said Christine ; trust ye henceforth, too, 

in God. 
Rest ye sure his mercy broodeth over all the souls He 

made. 

We are spirits, groaned the Fairy, greatly of our end 

afraid ; 
Though a flickering hope inspires us with belief that we 

shall be 
Joined, at last, with Him and heaven, in his boundless 

clemencie. 

Be it, said she ; knew not I, nathless, so saintly your 

desire ; 
And if mine your royal sanction to reseek my loving 

sire, 
He within his halls sustains, for mercy's sake, a godly 

frere, 
Who to pious aspirations ever lends a piteous ear ; 
And will grant his sacred blessing to your nation : doubt 

it ne'er ; 
He will bless what'er loves me ; for I to him was alway 

dear. 

Speed thee earthwards, said the sovran, speed thee, 
dearest child of light. 



A FAIRY TALE. 155 

On the instant, hosts of fairies warbling darted into 

sight. 
Airs delicious, such as never mortal heard from human 

hands, 
Whispered loud from golden clarions, harped on strings 

of silver strands, 
Strains triumphant, thrilled and echoed through those 

dim, enchanted lands. 
Speed thee, heart of love, they faltered, speed thee on 

thy star-taught way ; 
Bring to Oberon and his people hope of heaven and 

peace for aye. 

Ah, farewell, ye good and loyal, said the princess, step- 
ping forth ; 

Ne'er shall I forget your bounties, never see surpassed 
your worth ; 

If not pure enough for heaven, ye are far too pure for 
earth. . 

Towards the limits far of Faerie quick their anxious 

course they took, 
And the hill she entered first self-opened like a magic 

book; 
Forth she peeped, and, backward turning to bestow one 

farewell look, 



156 A FAIRY TALE. 

Nothing saw she, nothing heard she, save a low and 

eerie wail 
With the rustle of the greenwood blending and the 

sunset gale. 

All was changed ; and she, deep sighing, tottered on her 

lonesome way, 
Till she neared a stunted hamlet ; children at their twi- 
light play, 
As she stooped to raise a withering rosebud, by the 

path that lay, 
Shyly tittering ; thus she spake them ; laugh ye at my 

fresh pulled roses ? 
We laughed to see an old, old beldame picking up our 

cast-off posies, 
Said they ; but she understood no word of what the 

bantlings uttered; 
And again they mouthed and mocked at that they said 

the old crone muttered. 

Soon she came where, blind with dotage, propped on 

staff, an old man stood ; 
All his tresses white with age as with its snows a wintry 

wood. 
Gaffer, said she, where 's the castle, that, on yonder 

mountain piled, 



A FAIRY TALE. 157 

Held the prince unpeered in honor? Late I left it, 

foolish child ! 
Mused a moment, recollecting ; presently the old man 

smiled. 

Second childhood then I fancy must at least, good dame, 

be thine ; 
I alone in all the region mind me of that lordly line ; 
I alone some words remember of the tongue that then 

was spoke, 
By the noble race that here dwelt, ere they felt war's 

iron yoke. 
King, peer, peasant, all were conquered, all uprooted at 

a blow ; 
One disastrous battle gave the country to a foreign 

foe; 
Slain or banished all; but that's well-nigh a hundred 

years ago. 

Yonder castle's crumbling ruin saw its lord, though 

dauntless, fall ; 
Dame and daughter he beheld both slain ; in vain his 

vassals all, 
In vain his son for crown and bride fought; he was 

left an idiot thrall. 



158 A FAIRY TALE. 

On the evening of his bridal, souls of war, those sea- 
kings came, 

And, ere midnight, tower and town were all engulfed 
in gory flame. 

Save the holy chaplain, none of all that princely house 
remained, 

And myself, the humblest menial, on the lands where 
once they reigned. 

He, in rock-hewn hermit's cavern, life, with passion 
undefiled, 

Wore away, in trances murmuring blessings on some 
wandered child, 

Daughter of his lord, 't was counted, by the cursed in- 
vading host 

Killed ; or wiled away by fairies ; howsoe'er, the child 
was lost. 

Twenty winters since his clay from mine to earth's cold 
arms was given ; 

And so long his blessed spirit has been with the saints 
in Heaven. 

Hold, she cried, I hear a weeping ; I no longer love the 

light; 
Back she started, and departed straightways through the 

deepening night. 



A FAIRY TALE. 159 

In the hill she heard a wailing and a sobbing sad and 
deep; 

And the crash of thousand harp-strings hands of des- 
peration sweep ; 

Then she laid her down, and, praying, slept the long 
unmorrowing sleep. 



THE END. 



Boston, 135 Washington Street, 
November, 1855. 



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